Boston, MA · emo · indie

Jejune

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'90s emo cult favorites, reunited for the faithful — bittersweet boy-girl vocals from the genre's tender first wave.

Jejune came together in 1996 in Boston, where founding members Arabella Harrison, Joe Guevara and Chris Vanacore met while studying at Berklee College of Music. Guevara and Vanacore had bonded over the hardcore band Unbroken; Harrison borrowed a bass from a friend to round out the lineup. The trio moved to San Diego in 1997, though they found the city's scene didn't match what they'd left behind.

The band's sound paired melodic, chiming guitar work with the interplay of Guevara's and Harrison's vocals, a softer, more melodic approach that set them apart from the shoutier hardcore-descended end of the emo scene. That combination left a mark on the indie-leaning bands that followed, even as Jejune themselves remained a relatively quiet presence within the genre's second wave.

Their debut album, Junk, was released on Big Wheel Recreation in 1997, built from demos originally meant as a starting point. A split single with Jimmy Eat World came out the same year, and a second album, This Afternoon's Malady, followed in 1998. The band toured widely, sharing bills with Jimmy Eat World, the Get Up Kids, Braid and Piebald, and added second guitarist Mark Murino in 1999.

By late 1999 the band was shifting toward poppier material for a planned third album, a change that caused internal friction and led to their breakup in early 2000. Big Wheel Recreation gathered the unfinished demos and outtakes into the posthumous release R.I.P. later that year. Afterward, the catalogue circulated mostly by word of mouth among listeners who discovered the genre after the fact.

Numero Group's later reissue of much of that catalogue renewed interest in the band, and in 2025 Jejune played their first shows in more than twenty-five years.

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