To quote a long-running catchphrase, “Emo’s not dead.” Not with scenester events like next week’s When We Were Young festival in Vegas or the traveling party known as Emo Nite. Even Warped Tour is making a comeback in 2025.
Also keeping the movement alive is this year’s 25th anniversary and celebration tour of The Get Up Kids’ seminal 1999 album “Something to Write Home About.”
One of the biggest sellers for indie imprint Vagrant Records, the album helped usher Midwest emo into the mainstream, influenced a litany of pop-punk bands (not the least of which was Chicago’s own Fall Out Boy) and became the soundtrack for every college-age Y2K survivor trying to figure out “what it all means” in the new millennium. The impact can still be seen today in many elder emos’ well-weathered tattoos of lyrics or the robot pair on the album’s cover.
Feel old yet? It’s okay, so do the members of the band.
“In some ways, it sounds like forever, it’s a whole quarter of a century. … But sometimes 25 years feels like the blink of an eye, like, how the heck did we get here? I never imagined we’d be doing this 25 years later, I’ll tell you that,” jokes guitarist Jim Suptic.
On the day we chat on the phone, he’s in a reflective mood. It’s just after the band celebrated the actual anniversary on Sept. 28 with a show in New York, bringing things full circle. “We did our record release show [in ‘99] in New York, at the Bowery Ballroom,” Suptic remembers, calling the last few months of the special tour run, in which they play the album in full, an “ongoing celebration … with a lot of emotional moments.”
That sentiment will hit an all-time high this week as The Get Up Kids wrap up the trek with two dates at Chicago’s Metro on Oct. 10 and 11 (the last club dates before the finale at the Best Friends Forever Fest Oct. 13). Even though The Get Up Kids (also including vocalist-guitarist Matt Pryor, bassist Rob Pope, drummer Ryan Pope and keyboardist Dustin Kinsey) hail from Kansas City, Chicago was always the home away from home.
They not only recorded their debut, 1997’s “Four Minute Mile,” over one weekend at Chicago Recording Co. with Shellac’s Bob Weston (“We were just teenagers; we had to sneak Ryan out of high school on a Friday to drive up to Chicago,” Suptic recalls), but there were countless shows here too as the band was getting its footing. Fast forward to 2014 and the band staged a similar 15th anniversary, full-album play of “Something to Write Home About” at that year’s Riot Fest. For the current tour, they symbolically tapped our own Smoking Popes to open the entirety.
“In Kansas City in the ‘90s, all the cool people got to move to Chicago,” Suptic says. “So we had a lot of friends there. We’ve always felt at home there. The Fireside Bowl shows were just legendary … and for indie bands to sell out the Metro, that was such a big deal.”
VHS video from several of those primitive dates is part of the brand-new, nostalgic-reel music video for “Holiday.” It’s part of the band’s 25th anniversary reissue effort for “Something to Write Home About,” which also includes a remastered double LP along with a 28-page color booklet and 12 previously unavailable demos of songs like “Valentine” and “Red Letter Day.”
After the rag-tag way “Four Minute Mile” was made, Suptic recalls feeling like “luxury” making “Something to Write Home About” at L.A.’s Mad Hatter Studios with label money to fund it. Helping it all was the fact that the band could feel the energy bubbling up around them with their comrades in the scene.
“I think the key to our success is that there was a community,” says Suptic, referencing bands like Braid and Jimmy Eat World. “When we did our first tour with Braid, people were at every show. They knew the punk labels, everyone was connected. And everyone was putting out really good music. … And we were just like, holy s- – -, friends of ours wrote that? We figured we gotta up our game.”
Even though Suptic admits the Get Up Kids sometimes get knocked for being too sincere on the record, it’s a label they’ll take. “It is a very sincere record about basically teenagers becoming young people and trying to figure everything out. The fact that it still connects with people is great.”
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