How Emo Night Brooklyn took over the city

By Jamie Kahn

Le Poisson Rouge isn’t Emo Night Brooklyn’s usual home, but nevertheless, the Greenwich Village venue played host on a recent Saturday to countless My Chemical Romance t-shirts, tattered Vans, and lots of eyeliner. The DJ paced the stage and spouted a cheeky, “Welcome to Warped Tour, motherfuckers!” The crowd went wild for it.

You’d be forgiven for thinking you had suddenly teleported to some dimly lit basement in 2010. But it’s 2022 and, weirdly, the culture is primed for Emo Night Brooklyn as they take their parties across the country, attracting crowds of 800 or more both at home and on the road. From their recurring spot at Brooklyn Bowl to hosting after party DJ sets at the When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas, it’s almost hard to imagine alternative nightlife without the presence of Emo Night Brooklyn. It’s become so successful that its founders — Alex Badanes and Ethan Maccoby — were able to quit their day jobs in April to devote themselves to the business full time.

But the story starts another lifetime, and another continent, away. The two met when they were each just 2 years old in Surrey, England. The pair became fast friends, sharing their love for emo and pop punk music.

“We became like, obsessed,” says Badanes. “We went to so many shows and concerts over the years, and if we weren’t going to concerts, we were just blasting songs and moshing. We were huge fans. And we had these awesome parties in high school.”

When the pair arrived in Boston for college — Maccoby went to Tufts and Badanes attended the Berklee College of Music — they began hosting early versions of what would become Emo Night Brooklyn.

“We were just throwing these parties in our dorm rooms with all this emo and moshing. We were like, ‘Anyone that loves emo and pop punk, you’re cool.’ We had this awesome community of people — it was like the ultimate pregame,” Badanes says.

Once graduated, they brought their dorm room party ethos to their new Williamsburg apartments — until they got too big. Badanes and Maccoby turned to a favorite local bar and music venue, the now-closed Cameo in Williamsburg. They kept the operation underground — literally: The very first Emo Night Brooklyn was held in Cameo’s 100-capacity basement in early 2015. When more than 300 people showed up, Cameo invited the party back, this time for their larger upstairs area.

The Emo Night Brooklyn parties of the 2010s captured a youthful, DIY milieu that has always haloed the genre. They were (and often still are) self-spun with Badanes and Maccoby in the DJ booth. The founders maintain that they aren’t club promoters or event planners by any means. And they kept Emo Night Brooklyn completely free of charge until moving to Brooklyn Bowl — their current home with plenty of room for angst-charged mosh pits at 800 capacity.

The entire business element of Emo Night Brooklyn — officially known as Burwood Media, the company Badanes and Maccoby started to incorporate it — seems to have blossomed almost entirely by chance. And this is especially true considering that the first few years of its existence occurred amidst pop punk’s sharpest dip in popularity since its initial commercial boom. My Chemical Romance split in 2013, Panic! At the Disco rapidly shed its members, Paramore was on a nebulous hiatus, and even Brand New saw their end in 2018. In 2019, the ever-present emo summer event Warped Tour, which had been going strong since 1995, went on the road for the last time. In addition to all of this, or perhaps even because of it, the widespread love and devotion of the pop-punk fanbase seemed to dry up. It became played-out old news, relegated to nostalgia fuel at best and cringe provocation at worst.

But there existed still a subset of people holding out until emo was ready for its grand comeback. And when the pandemic hit, isolating many and sending plenty back to their teenage bedrooms, the unapologetically forlorn, punchy, expressive genre that pokes at the core of feeling alone suddenly sparked appeal once more.

“Gen Z is bringing emo back,” BuzzFeed declared last May, a sentiment that has been echoed in trend story after trend story since.

Skip ahead to 2022, and you’ll find emo everywhere. From Willow Smith and Machine Gun Kelly singing “I fell in love with an emo girl” to Yellowcard reuniting at Riot Fest, emo music is having another moment — and Emo Night Brooklyn is here for it.

“If we were any part of that [resurgence], amazing. I don’t know,” says Maccoby. “And I can’t claim that we necessarily were. But it’s pretty incredible, because you have a few different groups of people that come to our shows. Some of them were the people that used to listen to this music, and this is more of a nostalgic thing for them, reliving their youth. But then you have a lot of people that are like, ‘I’m 18, I’m in high school, and this is what I’m listening to now.’ I don’t know exactly what caused this revival, but I’m here for it. And it’s amazing.”

As Emo Night Brooklyn became one of the borough’s nightlife staples, Burwood Media has expanded — taking the same format to other styles like disco, 2010’s pop, show tunes, and reggaeton. They’re the wizards behind the curtains of Gimme Gimme Disco, Best Night Ever, Defying Gravity, and Gasolina.

“We wanted to not just give people who love emo music the best night of their lives, but we wanted to create that magic for more people. People that love disco, people that love Taylor Swift and One Direction.” says Maccoby. “And so we were like, let’s replicate this awesome formula. People like to party to music that they love. And now Gimme Gimme Disco has actually been even more successful than Emo Night Brooklyn.”

Which is perhaps good news for them, in the event emo should go out of style a second time.