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- It’s good to be emo these days. Weiss should know; his band is among the most beloved in a network of bleeding-heart rockers that has grown from an obscure but fervent underground presence to a critical and commercial power. This kind of night has become the norm for Into It. Over It. A few days earlier, the band sold out New York’s 550-capacity Bowery Ballroom; a day after that they pulled more than 800 people to Philadelphia’s Union Transfer. Weiss and his peers have been drawing crowds in the hundreds for a while, but the fervor around their bands went into hyperdrive about six months ago when what had been a slow-simmering grassroots scene boiled over into a media orgy. All at once, a critical establishment that had long turned its nose up at emo suddenly started doling out rave reviews. After years in the wilderness, emo was all the rage.
Into It. Over It. was a prime beneficiary of this press stampede. Last fall, the band’s video for “No Amount Of Sound” premiered at MTV, around the same time they were name-checked in emo roundups at Pitchfork, Buzzfeed, and here at Stereogum. What The Chicago Reader identified as emo’s fourth wave (after the hardcore reactionaries of the ’80s, the creative spleen-venting of the ’90s, and turn-of-the-millennium “hair metal” emo) had become a media sensation. The #emorevival was on, with Weiss at the forefront.