by Andrew Sacher (@andrewdsacher), intro by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
The music world was sent reeling once again with the seismic loss of Brooklyn Vegan, a site that supported countless up-and-coming bands over the past two decades. As one of the music world’s most valuable sources for new bands releasing music and touring, we’ve been struggling to make sense of it all (there’s no sense to be made). It’s an undeniable shame when people value greed and asset culture over independent music journalism, but thankfully former Brooklyn Vegan writers like Bill Pearis and Andrew Sacher won’t be going away anytime soon. They’ve both launched respective Substack newsletters, each operating with the same fervor for music they shared time and time again over at BV.
As Sacher pushes forward with his newsletter, Unhappy Place, he’s also set to release Emo Revival: Community, DIY, and Rebirth in Post-Hardcore and Emo, his first book, on September 8th via CLASH Books. Today Post-Trash has the honor of sharing an exclusive excerpt of Sacher’s fourth wave emo book with a selection focused on Hop Along’s second full length, Get Disowned. Read on below and be sure to pre-order a copy. - DG
One of the era’s most crucial albums to toe the line between emo and indie rock was Hop Along’s 2012 album Get Disowned. Its lead single and standout track “Tibetan Pop Stars” inspired one Pitchfork reviewer to say the song “should be etched in titanium and shot into outer space for safekeeping,” and blink-182’s Mark Hoppus once called it “the most painfully beautiful song ever.” Those are far from the only times that a person has used immense hyperbole to try to describe Hop Along, singer/guitarist Frances Quinlan’s voice, or this song in particular, but the widespread interest in Get Disowned was far from immediate. When it first came out, it hardly made a peep outside of niche DIY circles.
Frances started Hop Along—originally called Hop Along, Queen Ansleis—as a solo project in the mid-2000s, and even on their earliest, roughest demos, it was clear that something was special about Frances’ songwriting. They were consuming a steady diet of freak folk, anti-folk, and some of the folk-leaning emo stuff, like Neutral Milk Hotel, Joanna Newsom, Kimya Dawson, Bright Eyes, and Rilo Kiley, and they quickly figured out a way to put their own spin on that music without ever sounding like they were imitating their heroes.
Frances released the first Hop Along, Queen Ansleis album, Freshman Year, in 2005 on their own Blue Moose Records, and by 2009, they had turned the project into a full band with their brother Mark on drums. They put out two full-band EPs that year, Is Something Wrong? and Wretches, and started getting immersed in the DIY emo scene that bands like Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing had been fostering. They especially hit it off with Algernon, whose Joe Reinhart spent two years working with Hop Along on Get Disowned at his Headroom studio as he was simultaneously making Algernon’s 2011 album Parrot Flies. “It was a pretty crazy two years,” Joe says, “of just trying to make these two records as good as I possibly could.”
"With Algernon, I would just do it myself because no one was there to tell me what to do, but with Frances it was great because there was a back-and-forth,” he says. “Like I'd come up with something and they'd say, 'Well, what if it was more like this?' And I'd be like, 'Well what if it was more like this?' And it would evolve into what it became. It was just the two of us drinking coffee and staying up all night. It was a blast.”
Between the variety of instruments strewn across Big Mama’s Warehouse and the other instruments and people they were able to bring in, Get Disowned is fleshed out by stomps, handclaps, a variety of keyboards, strings, organ, accordion, steel drum, banjo, autoharp, slide guitar, and multiple guest vocalists and musicians from the growing DIY emo scene. It’s an album that could never fully be created live, but Hop Along didn’t need it to be. Get Disowned and the band’s live show were two separate beasts.
“Watching that record get made in The Headroom, in the warehouse at Big Mama's, it was like watching someone construct a building,” says 1994!’s Chris Diehm. “They would strip Fran's songs down to like their base elements, and then scaffold it, and then pull the acoustic guitar, and try to figure out what else they could do. It was one of the most intentional records I've ever seen anyone make.”
Like Parrot Flies, Get Disowned came out on Algernon’s Hot Green label, and like every other stage of Hop Along’s career up until that point, it was a slow and steady rise. It got very little press, save for a 4.5/5-star Punk News review that called it “probably the best album that will be released this year,” and the band was still playing lots of small DIY shows and opening for other bands in support of it. But you could quickly tell that it was one of those albums that people either loved or just hadn’t heard yet. At every show they opened, there was a group of people up front who knew all the words. And every few months, that group got bigger.
“I could not believe that record when it came out,” said Jeff Rosenstock, who later named it his favorite album of 2012 (with The Sidekicks’ Awkward Breeds at #2 and Joyce Manor’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired at #6). “It didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard. It was so beautiful, and so fucked up and weird, and so great.”
“That ‘Tibetan Pop Stars’ song, we were just like, You can write a song that good? What the fuck?” recalls Barry from Joyce Manor, who played some shows with Hop Along around The Fest that year. “And their voice is so fucking good. They raised the bar.”
Augusta Koch, a Philly house show regular who was starting up her own band Cayetana around the time Get Disowned came out, would agree—she had been floored ever since seeing one of Hop Along’s early shows at Ava House.
"Especially as someone who also has a raspier voice, I was so excited by it,” says Augusta. “I just thought Frances was such an embodiment of an artist. Whereas our group of friends was kind of shitty and drinking all the time, I would see Fran and be like, 'That's an artist, a true artist.' Their lyrics were so weird, they were an amazing painter, everything about them. And I was just like, 'I want to be that somehow.' It was almost on a different level than everything else, and I still think that they are.”
The more Hop Along toured on Get Disowned, the more the album and the band’s live show slowly won people over. Balance and Composure’s Jon Simmons remembers Hop Along opening for his band the year after the album came out, and being totally caught off guard by their performance. “I had never heard them before, and I was completely blown away,” he says. “[Frances' voice] is like the best voice in the entire world.”
“I was mesmerized by their set,” he adds. “I thought it was one of the coolest sets I've ever seen in my life. I remember watching people's faces in the crowd, and people were really resonating with it. It was a really special moment.”