What makes for a great emo ballad? You know it when you hear it, but at its core, it’s somewhere between soaring, dramatic hooks and enough heart-wrenching moments sprinkled in between. The classics feel obvious enough — Dashboard Confessional’s “Hands Down,” Paramore’s “The Only Exception,” and Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” — but instead of narrowing down our own list, we turned to our readers and asked them to name the best emo ballads, ever. Their answers went deep, spilling across the genre’s many different waves, and you can find the top fan picks ranked below.
Read more: 9 bands commonly mistaken as emo who really aren’t
5. Jimmy Eat World – “Hear You Me”
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Bleed American is a bulletproof album where Jimmy Eat World’s heartfelt storytelling collided with polished hooks. In terms of ballads, though, our readers pointed to “Hear You Me” — a devastating and powerful track about loss that’s since been featured in a handful of movies and TV episodes. The emo ballad was written in tribute to a pair of devoted sisters, Mykel and Carli Allan, who supported the band early on but died in a car crash in the late ’90s. May angels lead you in.
4. Dashboard Confessional – “Screaming Infidelities”
Undoubtedly, Dashboard Confessional’s “Screaming Infidelities” is a quintessential 2000s emo ballad that defined a generation unafraid to wear their heart on sleeve. One of its most poignant versions came from the band’s MTV Unplugged session, which became legendary for its intimate, charged atmosphere where the audience overpowered Chris Carrabba’s vocals. “That song is a strange thing…” Carrabba reflected in a 2020 interview. “There’s times where it applies to who I am right now, in subject matter. There’s times where I am standing onstage, right there at the Unplugged. There’s times where I’m in the van, parked in the lot where I wrote this song. Then there’s times where it’s all the way back to the life experience that led me to write the song.”
3. Mayday Parade – “Miserable at Best”
At this point in their career, Mayday Parade are masters of the emo ballad, and a lot of their songs could’ve topped this list. However, our readers landed on “Miserable at Best,” the Lesson in Romantics track that solidified the band’s reputation as formidable storytellers back in the late 2000s. Written by Jason Lancaster, it’s gut-wrenching heartbreak through and through, ditching their usual high energy for piano-led emotion that captures the messiness of a breakup.
2. Something Corporate – “Konstantine”
At nearly 10 minutes, Something Corporate’s “Konstantine” is an epic piano ballad that’s unlike the other songs on this list. There’s a reason it quickly earned a reputation as the emo “Bohemian Rhapsody,” offering a complete emotional journey for those who are willing to take it. Its length is the very reason the band often wouldn’t include it in their setlists, explaining that it took away from their other songs, though they did play it during their encore on their 2024 reunion tour, offering a rush of euphoria for those who stuck around.
1. My Chemical Romance – “I Don’t Love You”
Situated at the midpoint of The Black Parade, “I Don’t Love You” is an emo ballad filled with stadium-level heartbreak. Compared to their other dramatic tracks, on TPB and beyond, it’d be too easy to mistake “I Don’t Love You” as simple, but it’s got real staying power, replete with Gerard Way’s powerful vocals that capture heartache so deftly. Two decades later, its poignant chorus — “When you go, and would you even turn to say/‘I don’t love you like I did yesterday’?” — still cuts as deep as it did in 2006.
