Hillsboro – this is me if i was you

play dead

I’ve been having a bit of a tortured relationship with emo lately. Perhaps that’s an apt feeling for a genre centered on overwrought feelings and regretful decisions. To be clear, I think it’s been a great year for the genre, but there’s never been such a clear divide between the pop-punk-flavored emo that has been dominant for the past decade or so and a burgeoning wave of younger artists harkening back even further to a sound closer to the genre’s roots. I suppose you have Fifth Wave between those two, but at this point, that label feels more a byproduct of COVID-era categorization than anything.

On one side, you have bands pulling influence from video games and pop culture, making fast-paced “weedmo” with big choruses and lots of ‘woe-is-me’ lyricism. Then, in direct contrast, you’ve got groups like First Day Back, The Ritornello Form, and Holidays in United States that represent an even younger set of artists, hailing mainly from the coasts and making a more second-wave-indebted sound. Despite my personal conflict, I like each of these camps about equally; emo is still emo, and I’m a dumbass emo fan at heart. Somewhere above all of this nonsense is Hillsboro, a five-piece band from Vancouver, British Columbia.

This band caught my eye for a few reasons. First, it landed in my inbox as “PNW post-hardcore,” and the band shares a name with the city outside of Portland, Oregon, where I grew up. That weird confluence led me in, a “FFO Sunny Day Real Estate and Pinegrove” got me perked up, and one spin of the band’s newest song had me hooked. 

While they’ve got an EP coming this Friday, the only song you can listen to right now is “My God,” a slow-mounting emo track that reminds me of the terminally underrated band Caracara. It’s got some pretty singing, overwrought sentiments, and a very emo chorus of “I will kill whatever I have to,” which builds into an awesome instrumental release. By the end of the song, lead singer Nima Walker is wailing the line over and over in a way that’s somehow both cathartic and catchy. 

In a quote explaining their approach to this lead single, Walker explained, “When I was writing ‘My God,’ I became completely obsessed with Avril Lavigne's ‘Complicated’ and that whole album--to the point where my friends kept buying it for me on different formats. I know she sometimes gets a bad rap, but a big part of Hillsboro has always been trying to break down the imaginary barriers people put up between emo, pop, dance music, indie rock, shoegaze, country, etc. When I first got into writing songs, I realized all of the music I love from each genre basically works the same way when it comes down to it; it's all the exact same melodic sensibility. With ‘Complicated’ especially there's just this naive honesty to it and I think it's so emo.” So there ya have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. Maybe “emo” only matters as much as we let it matter. 

“My God” is just the first song off this is me if i was you, a three-track EP the band is releasing in a few days. Thanks to this shorter release size, it means each song is allowed to explore very different territory, offering a restful acoustic track followed by a noisy, scream-filled closer. I’ve always maintained that the EP is the superior format for emo music, allowing bands to present their best qualities in a bite-sized form without overthinking the presentation or the message too much. The 12 minutes of music on this release seem to back that up, but I’ll leave that up to you to decide when the full thing drops this Friday.