Christopher Emond is at the center of a budding, barely-definable New York experimental emo scene. Maya Rajan stops by HQ to find out what DIY looks like in 2026.
On the last night of February’s cold, Property is Theft hosted an emo show. A fundraiser for families affected by I.C.E. I knew all the names on the bill apart from Christopher Emond.
An army of boys with crossbody bags blocked my view of his set, but I was drawn to the sound immediately. His raspy, pleadingly gentle vocals reminded me of the emo music I came up on, while the mix of violin, acoustic guitar, and glitchy electronica felt totally new. I got on my tippy toes and snuck a peek, slightly surprised. Maybe it was Emond’s rat tails peeking out from his winter hat, or his ability to switch from such a pained singing voice to talking like A Guy From The Bay. Perhaps it was the fact that he reminded me of MySpace in 2026.
Christopher Emond: I was on Tumblr a lot as a kid,
Maya Rajan: Yeah I can tell.
I saw him play the other week, opening for Emperor X (epic) at The Sultan Room. He played with his violinist Zach Mezzo, and was joined by Josh Boucicaut on the saxophone. At this point, I know Emond not just as a solo musician, but as a part of a musical ecosystem.
Emond released his debut album Music from Clocks last summer. Across thirteen tracks, confessional emo songwriting dissolves into dark electronic interludes and fuzzy ambient. It feels unfinished in the best sense—not incomplete, but still breathing. The synths hum with the kind of nostalgia that makes childhood bedrooms feel haunted long after you’ve moved away. My favorite song, “Fractured in Braids,” brings out a specific melancholy, one I thought was exorcised upon having my braces removed. Emond played almost all the instruments on Music From Clocks, bringing in trusted friends and collaborators on certain tracks, the same approach he is taking for his upcoming Forgiveness Record.
That balance between intimacy and exploration feels emblematic of a broader movement in New York right now. The city’s current emo scene is expressive, ambitious, and fluid. Bands share rehearsal spaces, swap members, appear on one another’s bills every week, yet resist collapsing into a single sound. ideasforconversations make analog dance music, but fit perfectly onto a screamo bill. Holidays in United States channel basement-show catharsis, their sets often turning into communal singing. The Dallas Cowboys fuse anthemic shouts, Auto-Tune, and breakbeats. Every project has identified the thing that makes it unmistakably theirs and pushed it further into unexplored territory rather than smoothing it out.
A few days after the Sultan Room show, I linked with Emond at his house, where he runs Orange Label Records and its experimental electronic imprint Crane Operator. Every release passes through his hands. He makes the artwork, writes liner notes, burns CDs, folds tray cards himself.
He meets me at his door in what I have come to understand as his uniform: well-loved jeans and at least three layers on top; this time a black long sleeve, under a Postal Service top, beneath a classic short sleeve button-up. Inside, the apartment is full of character but not messy. Just a lot of stuff.
Emond: I don’t have a closet here, but we’re about to move.
CDs in every stage of assembly crowd the tablespace. Some are blank, some are wrapped and just waiting to be addressed. Posters, torn out pages, and paintings sprinkle the wall. Little trinkets everywhere. There’s a sketchbook on the table full of hand-drawn posters—for Alana Markel, Trinity Ace, the recent Mila Culpa show. Two laptops stack on top of each other, stickers categorized and bagged. He keeps on tinkering, changing records (“This is a cool Sudanese one I found when I went to Montreal”), changing volume (“Wait why’s it quiet”), changing the thermostat (“it’s hot, right?”).
Talking about music keeps Emond still. “Senior year of high school, I wanted to play shows but no one would book me,” he tells me, “So I started Orange Label, and I would email people from a fake name, my manager or whatever. But it was just me, trying to get booked.”
The label was initially a workaround. Then it became an education. Emond taught himself every job he imagined belonged to someone else: shooting music videos, designing artwork, manufacturing CDs, promoting releases, booking tours. “I learned how to do all the different facets I imagined were being withheld from me.”
Emond: Music is intensely personal to me. It’s inextricable from the way that I present myself, through my personality, through the things that I wear, or what I do.
Emond released all of his own music through Orange Label, and eventually started to put his friends’ work out. “The first CD release that wasn’t my stuff was Riya’s, Quiet Light.” Emond started Crane Operator, an imprint of the label, last year after listening to more drone and wanting a dedicated space for projects of that nature. The instrumental strictness ended with ideasforconversations.
Releasing both Blue Angel Sparkling Silver and No Bad Words says a lot about Emond’s curatorial instincts. On paper they couldn’t be more different. Quiet Light’s spacious, synth-textured album has become one of the year’s most acclaimed indie-pop releases, while ideasforconversations built their reputation through frequent, ecstatic live shows. “It’s been…” Emond reaches to check the catalog number on the disc in front of him, “like 24 different CD runs so far.” He is surrounded by sparkly silver discs.
Emond: I did a really big order yesterday, this is the leftover pile.
Why do physical releases feel so important to you?
Emond: I think there’s something really grounding about it — music has become ephemeral, that’s why I gravitated towards buying CDs and vinyl in the first place. It brings music into reality, and you can really just own the thing that you’re listening to, rather than streaming.
Do you listen to your own music?
Emond: My unreleased stuff, yeah. I need to give it my own litmus test over numerous months.
What about stuff you released a long time ago?
Emond takes a beat. “I used to really hate myself,” he starts, facing me, “in terms of just how disjointed what I wanted to be making was, from what I was making. I had aspirations to be something that I just so innately was not.”
Emond: I think over the years I’ve reconciled those two things a bit more. I’m finally comfortable in my own skin for the first time. That has allowed me to go back to my older stuff and appreciate it — it’s a part of yourself, you know, that’s something. You’re never going to experience being in that mental state again. It’s kind of like a record, a document of what you were trying to do at that point in time.
We take a smoke break, sitting on his stoop and reveling in the post-sunset coolness. He tells me about his childhood piano teacher; she smoked like a chimney and her house was covered in Tintin comics. “I never practiced, I really just read the comics, but I loved improvising!” Emond laughs. “My mom and I were taking concurrent lessons—I must have been what, six? Seven?”
Emond always wanted to make music. It felt so natural, but it was lonely. His mum quit piano, his friends liked different stuff, his dad liked the radio. He never found his scene in San Jose, playing Japanese detective games on his DS and chasing culture online instead. “I always kind of felt like I was just on a weird little island.”
Is there any music you found back then that still feels important to you?
Emond: My first musical memory is driving home from the mall with my dad and “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service was on. So I have to give my dad that one, but when I got online I dove deeper into their liner notes which led me to Jimmy Tamborello and further into experimental electronic music.
I wonder if Emond knows how much he fiddles with his rat tails while he’s thinking. It’s the same as me playing with my necklace or spinning a ring on my finger, an attempt to ground myself and to access the perfect part of my brain. He tells me about finding Phil Elverum later on, his writing pushing Emond to focus more on lyrics. A notification on his laptop draws his hands out from his hair and onto the keys.
Emond: I’ll write down what the order is, because then we have to go back into my little basement area and pick out the order.
He scans a website, jotting down notes on a piece of scrap paper. Then, he leads me to the rubble that exists between his bedroom and staircase, tucked into a weird corner. Anyone living within the New York rental market, where somehow closets and windows are treated like wants, not needs, will relate. There are boxes with labels crossed out and written over: “Free Stuff CRANE OPERATOR STUFF DO NOT THROW AWAY.” Emond reads off his list while passing CDs back to me.
Emond: This person got one Tal Castle CD, one Zachary Mezzo CD… this person got one Christopher CD, one Chris Olsen CD… one ideas CD and one Alana CD. That’s a nice order.
I tuck a stack under my arm as the passing continues, thinking about my favorite bit of The Goldfinch: “I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand.” I clutch the CDs, something real in my hands, passed from and onto others. Owning things in an era where everything is being leased is important. Things that don’t come with billing cycles, no statement due.
Emond: The older I get, the more I like confines. Having the ability to be creative within a certain set of hours.
On Saturdays, Emond has his rehearsal/recording time slot. He, Holidays in United States, Superfan, Oldstar, Harry Teardrop, Push Ups, and a few other groups share a practice space in Queens. On Sundays, he handles orders.
The ritual excites him. “It’s super tactile,” he says, laying out a few CD cases, “If you can imagine, this times, like, 20 — I’ll have cases all unassembled there, and then these tray cards will go down, all in the CDs, and then the physical popping in of it is so — let’s just do one, right?” He’s straight up giddy. I am too, I love hearing about this. He places a tray card in, then a disc, and pops the case closed. It makes the perfect sound. It is the opposite of any sort of text tone, an exemplary analog reward.
The full set up for a bigger order could involve up to 40 cases laid out across surfaces, two laptops, two burners. It’s down to a science; he knows the lag on one is long enough to insert a few tray cards before pressing “burn.” When one line is all packed, on go the stickers, printed from Sticker App.
Emond: Liner-notes-wise, I usually just let the album play and write stream of consciousness, then I edit until it reads well. It’s part of the confines thing, it has to fit in this little sticker.
I observe one sticker placement before assembling an ideasforconversations case on my own. My tenure at a health foods store with sticker-labeled sides led up to this.
Emond: Sometimes if you do too many of these, your skin gets, like — starts coming off.
What?
Emond flexes his newest splurge: plastic slip CD bags. “I was using Ziplocs before, these look so nice.” The stickers keep going down, one case at a time, and I bag them after. It’s an easy rhythm. I think about Jeanne Dielman’s flow. Garrett’s Yo La Tengo record clicks over to its next song.
Emond and his roommate Garrett met as neighbors in LA. “I had always been pretty insular with making music,” Emond says, focused on the sticker. “Garrett was one of the first people to really take interest in wanting to make music with me.”
When Emond moved to New York, he convinced Garrett to join. Shows started ramping up and the scene was expanding and things never seemed to slow back down.
Emond: There is some level of friendly competition between everyone. Everyone is doing something slightly different, so you’re incentivized to push really far in your own thing — to go up against someone else’s own thing, which is way cooler than you both making things that are basically the same. There’s no guiding descriptor to link all of us, but there’s something there between us.
This is a scene in its infancy, defined less by genre than mutual encouragement. It’s rare to see a local scene this interconnected without becoming homogeneous. The independence Emond spent years honing has quietly become a way of making space for other people. Orange Label Records started as one kid emailing strangers under a fake name, teaching himself every skill he thought was being gatekept from him. Now, it has become the way he gives other people a place to belong. It’s stickers and tray cards and CDs passed hand to hand across a table crowded with everyone else’s names on it too.
