emo, also called emocore,  subgenre of punk rock music that arose in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s. Guy Picciotto (who was later a founding member of the influential hard-core group Fugazi) and his band, Rites of Spring, launched the subgenre when they moved away from a punk scene that sometimes favoured attitude over substance, and they put the focus of the music and lyrics on personal pain and suffering. This confessional approach to singing punk music was dubbed emocore, or hard-core emotional, by fans in the 1980s. The lyrics in emo songs dealt primarily with tales of loss or failed romance, and they were often characterized by self-pity. The stories in emo music strongly resonated with teenage fans.

Over time, emo evolved to include radio-friendly pop punk bands, such as Weezer, Jimmy Eat World, Get Up Kids, Saves the Day, and Fall Out Boy, whose sound bore little resemblance to that of the Washington, D.C., hard-core scene. Emo became less associated with a specific sound, and groups such as Death Cab for Cutie found themselves saddled with a label that took on an increasingly pejorative connotation. Like punk before it, the word emo was eventually applied to fashions and attitudes that had little to do with the music that initially defined the term.