In her crucial essay “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” critic Jessica Hopper held that for punk rock to maintain meaning, it needed “the continual presence of radicalized women,” with “those women being encouraged, given reasons to stay, to want to belong.” Hopper’s missive is more than two decades old, and in the last few years, her plea has been answered by a raft of bands fronted by and giving voice to people outside the pop-punk scene’s cis-white-male hegemony.
At 9:30 Club, Meet Me at the Altar is fueled by nostalgia
