Sorry, But Death Cab For Cutie Were Never An Emo Band
A generation of emo fans were led astray by 'The O.C.'
Trying to define music in 2020 is a hifalutin exercise that doesn’t achieve all that much. These days, there is a dwindling number of artists that prescribe to a singular genre — and that’s just how we like it.
But as much as we love these blurred lines, it’s also the reason why no one can definitively answer the age-old question: is Death Cab For Cutie an emo band or not?
The path that leads to truth is littered with Reddit threads, op-eds, and angry tweets. “I’m about to clobber my best friends [sic] boyfriend for calling Death Cab for Cutie emo,” yells Kelsie Morris. “They are very much Seattle indie,” she told Music Junkee over Twitter DM. “But I don’t think their sound has ever been what the typical emo band sound is.”
But if, like me, you grew up in the early 2000s, a fair chunk of your understanding of what is typically emo comes from a show about wealthy Californian teenagers.
The O.C. informed an entire generation’s adult opinions, for better or worse. The show followed a kid from the wrong side of the tracks called Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) and his journey into Newport Beach, a city filled with absurd wealth and scandal. It was never supposed to be about the tortured protagonist’s awkward sidekick, but Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) was charming, funny, and most importantly the first self-professed emo to worm their way into pop culture.
“Yeah, that’s right, I’m a big dork and I listen to emo,” he once proudly declared in the hallways of Harbor High School. Despite the suburban emo kids spilling into my school hallways in growing numbers, Seth became my benchmark of what emo was — the case for many who got caught up in The O.C. phenomenon.
His curly locks, designer threads, and button-up shirts were a stark contrast to the suburban emo kids who drew their eyeliner thick and wore their fringes long. The only thing that tied him to the culture — or so we were told — was his taste in music, which spanned The Shins, Bright Eyes, Kavalier and Clay, and of course, Death Cab. In particular, it was Transatlanticism that became part of the show’s DNA. “Well that was my favourite band at the time,” Brody confessed in a 2019 interview with GQ. “I was coming off of two years of really obsessing over them.”
Death Cab were constantly referenced throughout the show. Seth played ‘A Movie Script Ending’ in his car, gave away their CDs for Chrismukkah (a neologism combining Christmas and Hannukah), fielded questions from his father about them (“Death Cab’s a band, yes?”), and eventually the band even made a cameo at the show’s fictional dive bar. The Bait Shop is a venue that imbued real-world success, featuring performances from The Killers, Modest Mouse, and The Thrills to name a few. Death Cab was also featured on Music From The O.C., one of the most commercially and critically successful television soundtracks.
With six compilation ‘mixes’ in total, Music From The O.C. arrived right as the internet was beginning to transform how listeners consumed music, and placement on the soundtrack was highly coveted for rising indie acts. It was instrumental to Death Cab’s breakthrough, and cemented their longstanding legacy as an emo favourite, tied to Seth’s ubiquitous presence.
Morris posits that “emo kids” likely “co-opted [the band] in the mid-2000s”, but the term was also used by others as an affront. “I think a lot of people who are snobby about rock music also use ‘emo’ as an insult and they’ve lumped [Death Cab] in with other bands.”
Black Fringes And Slippery Boundaries
It’s interesting to consider how one word can inspire both nostalgia and contempt, but “emo is a very nebulous concept,” according to New York-based journalist Alec. “The boundaries between pop-punk, indie rock, post-hardcore, and emo aren’t always very clear,” they told Music Junkee.
Depending on who you ask, some people think that emo requires “a punk structure for its song recipe” while others look for “strained, angular tautness that comes from emotive hardcore.” For others it’s just subject matter alone, but the vague requirements of what is and isn’t emo place Death Cab in an awkward position.
“I consider everything [they] did up until Transatlanticism to be emo,” Alec continues. “So if you’re looking at the band through the lens of Plans and beyond, I get rejecting the emo label. ‘Soul Meets Body’ and ‘I’ll Follow You Into the Dark’ are fine songs, but they’re essentially Starbucks-core radio pop.”
Pitchfork writer Ian Cohen wrote in a review that the band has “always been an awkward fit into ’emo’ as a musical idea since that entails some basis in punk and Death Cab clear have nothing of the sort.”
Lead singer Ben Gibbard is happy to distance the band from any ‘emo’ characterization. “From the very get-go, I was very disinterested in being attached to that music, because a lot of it was just really bad,” he revealed in a 2018 interview with Vice.
“Seriously, listen to some of that stuff. It’s like they were into NOFX and then heard Pinkerton and were like, “’Oh man, I got feelings! I’m a suburban white kid but I don’t really have the intellectual capacity to express these feelings in an interesting way so I’m going to speak about them in the most straightforward manner possible.’ And a lot of it is just really cringey to me.”
“Seriously, listen to some of that stuff. It’s like they were into NOFX and then heard Pinkerton and were like, “’Oh man, I got feelings!”
The band avoided joining tours and labels alongside other emo bands. “It was like The Matrix. We were able to Matrix away from the emo tag taking us down,” Gibbard adds, though he doesn’t have anything against those who think of the band in “that way.”
Ultimately, Death Cab is an indie band whose glittery rock, sad boy tendencies, and early lo-fi meditations on heartbreak got confused with the ubiquity of Seth Cohen and mid-2000s emo kids.
So why do so many of us continue to push the band into a box it doesn’t logically fit in? Well, genre is a tricky business tangled in pretension and music snobbery. Recently, we’ve celebrated artists who staunchly refuse to be pigeonholed — think of the success of Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X, or Tyler, The Creator.
Our looseness when it comes to defining Death Cab is tied to nostalgia for a time, a TV show, and perhaps to our undying love for a fictional character. So even though they aren’t technically an emo band, it’s okay if they hold real estate in your mid-2000s emo heart.
Kish Lal is a writer and critic based in New York City. She is on Twitter.
All this week, Music Junkee is tumbling down memory lane and exploring everything to do with the emo. Get stuck in here.