Twenty-five years later, wintery young-adult alienation still creeps over “Spider in the Snow” like frost. The fourth song on the Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I starts with synthesized strings wafting like steam through a sidewalk grate. Air hangs cold and still around the bass and drums as Travis Morrison looks back on a group of friends from his early 20s, when he lived in a group house on 13th Street NW and hung out at D.C.’s State of the Union club. In just a few years, he became so distant from those friends he forgot their names.
“At that time in your life, people say you’re looking for love, but you’re really looking for home,” says Morrison. The death of his father and birth of his nephew around that time left him all the more existentially adrift. “I was a little haunted,” Morrison says, adding that, after a parent’s death, “You can’t stop oblivion. All those things together, the shards of trying to connect to people and not understanding why they didn’t leave an impression in my mind … I was already starting to think about solidity, and if it even exists.”
City Paper spoke with Morrison from his home in Durham, North Carolina, ahead of Emergency & I’s anniversary. This month, the album will be the same age as he was when he wrote its songs. After a quarter of a century, it still soundtracks 20-somethings shuffling through the snowdrifts of postadolescence, leaving behind prefabricated college social circles, and struggling to find homes, literal and figurative, in a larger world. Dismemberment Plan broke up in 2003, two years after releasing their fourth album, Change, but their music kept spreading. The band continue to pack, and often sell out, venues any time they make a comeback, as they did from 2010 to 2014 (a reunion that produced a fifth album, Uncanney Valley), and again for a brief mid-Atlantic tour this September. Somewhere along the way, Morrison noticed a shift in the audience’s age.
“Back then, the attendance was almost totally our peer group,” Morrision says, referring to the band’s initial run. “Now we have a relatively flat spectrum. The North Carolina show had a ton of younger people—they really pushed my parent friends from my kids’ school to the back.”
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With its odd time signatures and dissonant guitars, Emergency & I isn’t an album you hear for the first time over stereo speakers at a house party, and it never made an impact on terrestrial radio. Morrison notes that it arrived in a no-man’s-land between the post-Nirvana alt-rock of the 1990s and the post-punk revival spearheaded by the Strokes in the early 2000s. Though the Dismemberment Plan counted acts such as the Promise Ring and Rainer Maria as friends, their wackiness put them squarely outside Midwest emo orthodoxy. Instead, with the help of the early internet, they became a continuous phenomenon unmoored from any trend; they had no aesthetic wave to lift them, but they did have thousands of Napster users and online radio listeners.
“We’re a band that’s pretty friendly to being left alone; you have your headphones on, and you’re like, ‘What the fuck is this shit?’” says Morrison. “And then you go to the show and there’s actually 200 people there, [you’re] like, ‘I don’t even know, but let’s give it a whirl.’”
Streaming algorithms and digital publications keep that dynamic alive today, but the question remains: Why the influx of Gen Z listeners? What makes 2024’s recent high school graduates so susceptible to offbeat songs about isolation and oblivion?
You could point to social media. “You Are Invited,” a magical realist parable about making peace with FOMO, hits hard in the age of the Instagram story. But if you ask young listeners, you get an even more obvious explanation: Lots of them came of age during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Skylar Jones, a 20-year-old fan from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, saw the band at their Richmond show this fall after discovering Emergency & I through a Spotify recommendation in late 2020.
“All I could really do in that moment was listen to music, discover music, and talk to my friends on Discord about music because it really was an escape from the rocky state of school and shit,” they say. “I think they’re a band that everyone can relate to, in a way. Very anxious and frightened about the future, yearning for something from the past … and having to move forward in life, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.”
Marlena Nagle, a 19-year-old from Arlington, tells a similar story. At the end of a Death Grips album, Spotify’s algorithm cued up Dismemberment Plan’s “Girl O’Clock,” a burst of sexual frustration that boils over into a nervous, stuttering breakdown. Her interest piqued, Nagle tried out the rest of Emergency & I, which stuck with her through the worst of the pandemic and the depression that it amplified.
“I remember listening to ‘The Jitters’ repeatedly one day and feeling like, ‘Wow, this guy just gets it,’” she says.
Nagle also credits the album with connecting her to her partner, Ben Ratner, the drummer for local band Heroes for Ghosts. This May, the two met at a show for pop-punk band Mach Zero at a VFW post in McLean. Afterward, Ratner offered her a ride to the Metro.
“My Emergency & I CD was playing, and she went, ‘Dude, I know this one!’” Ratner remembers. “I put on ‘Girl O’Clock’ and said, ‘You know this one though?’ She knew every freaking word, dude. I fell in love at that moment.”
Ratner, 20, discovered Emergency & I in 2021, during his senior year of high school. The boldness of it captivated him—particularly in drummer Joe Easley’s heart palpitation rhythm on “Girl O’Clock.” He convinced his bandmates in Heroes for Ghosts to cover the song after “a manic bout of determination” drove him to practice the drum part for weeks straight. Ultimately, they recorded that cover, featuring Nagle on backup vocals, for Heroes for Ghosts’s upcoming debut album, Powerslide.
“We think it’s really funny to have it as our song, especially considering the subject matter,” says Nagle.
From Dismemberment Plan’s two sold out 2024 D.C. shows ; courtesy of the Atlantis
When Dismemberment Plan kicked off their September tour at the Atlantis (followed by a second night at the 9:30 Club), Nagle, Ratner, and Heroes for Ghosts’ lead guitarist Ibrahim El-Sayed met Morrison before the show to tell him their story. During the set, Morrison dedicated “Girl O’Clock” to them and dubbed their friend group “the chaos committee” for their high energy in the pit. Also part of the committee: 19-year-old John Galdamez, who discovered the Dismemberment Plan while reading Pitchfork reviews in 2021. At the time, Galdamez was struggling to recover from a strained social life after a year of online classes. More recently, they became friends with Nagle, Ratner, and El-Sayed by way of the “Girl O’Clock” cover.
“I met this group of friends because I’m friends with their band’s bassist, who told me to come to their show because they were covering the Plan,” says Galdamez. “So really, if it weren’t for the Plan, I wouldn’t have made this great group of friends.”
The reunion shows have evolved in more than just demographic makeup. Fans used to swarm the stage during “The Ice of Boston,” but today’s venue safety rules would require the Dismemberment Plan to cap the number of fans allowed up. Instead, on this tour, they reversed the tradition. Morrison, guitarist Jason Caddell, and bassist Eric Axelson played the song from the GA pit. (Just as well, says Morrison—people were better at keeping their hands to themselves on the floor: “[On stage] people would kinda … touch me. There would be some rock ’n’ roll boundary pushing …When I went down there, it was like I was coming to their house, and it was much less messy!”)
The band’s traditional set closer, “OK, Joke’s Over,” has also evolved. It always ends with a partial cover of a current pop song, and for September’s shows, they chose Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” (Morrison spent a good chunk of our conversation raving about Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and its album-length narrative arc about looking for home.)
Following an appearance at the United Sounds NYC Festival on Oct. 25, the Dismemberment Plan will return to hiatus until further notice; Morrison says their other jobs will keep them off the road for the next few years at least. Remarkably, he says, some of their songs have grown with him over decades of touring them in sporadic, stop-start fashion. When he sings “Spider in the Snow” now, he thinks about his children navigating the unknowns of their own young adulthood. Still, he speaks with modest bewilderment about Emergency & I’s enduring impact. Did he ever foresee talking about it 25 years later? “Oh, no,” he says, with a self-deprecating cackle. “When I was 25? Are you crazy? Thinking like that?”
“Fighting oblivion is generally a losing bet,” he says. “Oblivion, father time, tends to win. I think we gave [the album] a little time to sink, and, in my life, I’ve seen incredible music, incredible bands, sink. Why it’s floated this far, I don’t know. It’s humbling, and I’m incredibly grateful.”
The album’s first song, “A Life of Possibilities,” ends on this very theme: the inherent risk in trying to connect with other people and in devoting yourself to something as unusual as Emergency & I. “If it’s a life of possibilities/ That you’ve gotta live,” say the lyrics, “Well, don’t be surprised/ When they don’t remember you/ Or simply don’t want to.”
But then again, don’t be too surprised if they do.