Get Up Kids

Guilt Show, the Get Up Kids' 2004 album, caught the Kansas City band a long way from the scrappy rush that made their name, and "Sympathy" shows how far: the guitars still chime and churn, but the song carries a moodier, more grown-up weight. They had started down that road two years earlier with On a Wire, which swapped the old urgency for a layered alternative rock sound, and like plenty of their peers they were keen to shake off the emo tag.

That tag was hard to lose, because they did so much to define it. Formed in 1995, the band became a cornerstone of emo's second wave, and 1999's Something to Write Home About, home of "Action and Action", is still held up as one of the movement's essential records. Saves the Day, Fall Out Boy, Taking Back Sunday and the Wonder Years have all been counted among the bands they shaped. Along the way they toured with Green Day and Weezer before headlining their own shows as far off as Japan and Europe, and set up Heroes & Villains, an imprint of Vagrant Records that launched side projects like the New Amsterdams and Reggie and the Full Effect.

Internal conflicts broke them up in 2005, but three years later they were back together, and they went on to release Simple Science in 2010, There Are Rules in 2011 and, in 2019, Problems, which many heard as a return to their early sound.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.