For a genre that was coined by disdainful punks who hated the stuff, emo or emotional hardcore has done quite well for itself. Admittedly, most emo fans are well under the age of consent and respectable publications like this one ignore it for the most part. If you avoided myspace and rail stations for a few months, you might even forget it exists. But it’s still a substantial force in modern popular music.

Of course, as with goth a generation ago, a genre so clearly defined by a sub-culture and non-musical ephemera rarely experiences sensible critical assessment. The clichéd exchange tends to be something like:

COOL MUSIC CRITIC: [X] are fairly typical of the kind of mallpunk juvenilia we’ve come to expect from earnest young men with heavy eyeliner.

MYSPACE BLOGGER: UR shit, CMC! If u can’t appreci8 them then you clearly havnt even listened, or ur head is so far up ur ass the shits getting in your ears.

CMC: My next review will be written ironically from the standpoint of a sub-literate myspace blogger. This will highlight how emo is only comprehensible to those on the wrong side of puberty and with no critical faculties whatsoever.

MSB: U suck. Dickwad. Etc. etc.

The Parisian left bank this isn’t.

Of course all of this discourse is quickly rendered irrelevant when a really top-shelf emo album comes along. Like Thursday’s A City by the Light Divided.

I have to admit at this point that I tend to fall into the Cool Music Critic camp on the bulk of emo, usually for no better reason than I feel that I should be too old and sophisticated for it. I can say this with the caveat that the mid-90s trinity of Sunny Day Real Estate, Christie Front Drive, and Texas Is The Reason rock my world, because liking mid-90s emo is actually pretty acceptable in the hipster community.

Thursday have shown me the error of my prejudices with an album that’s still clearly a part of the genre but free of its worst excesses. For my money, the second half of City—from the shimmering “Running from the Rain” through to the anthemic finale “Autumn Leaves Revisited”—is the best run of songs on any album this year.

At least part of this can be attributed to indie super-producer Dave Fridmann—the man who recently took Low and Sleater-Kinney’s sounds to new places, albeit controversially. The mix is thick with guitars and pounding drums; the overall effect akin to hearing a rock band play in an open train carriage at high speed.

The press coverage to date has been remarkably positive—the album hailed as a great leap forward for a talented band. While the album mostly sounds unlike anything else in mainstream punk, it would still be easy to tar the band with the standard emo brush. The fact that people haven’t is a tribute to the power that good music has to shatter misconceptions.

I’m very glad that mine were.

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