VA - Sequoia (2025)

Sequoia gathers 25 original nuggets from emo’s first decade. Each of the 25 7”s calls back to their original handmade roots, housed in sturdy chipboard jackets with facsimile inner sleeves and replica labels. The accompanying 136-page hardcover book tells the tale from D.C. to San Diego, Vermin Scum to Gravity, Jon Hiltz’s Basement to the Red House, studiously capturing the yelps, screams, and spoken passages that defined the oft-misunderstood genre. Illustrated with hundreds of flyers, ads, and photographs from Numero’s vast archive, Sequoia documents a vibrant, interconnected scene at the end of the American century.

“Sequoia is a celebration of the survival of this music,” compiler Ken Shipley said. “These 7"s were entirely ephemeral, souvenirs of an experience filed away in cardboard boxes in the attics and basements provided by our parents; thrown away during a move or sold when we got into indie rock or soul or drugs or kids; marked down to a buck or tossed into the free bin; abandoned by their creators as 33rpm moments of youthful exuberance.”

This isn't a 7" boxset as much as it's the defining document of where punk rock was in the '90s. The cities, labels, venues, zines, bands, predecessors and spawns. The 136-page book covers where the scene came from, where it was, wasn't and went. This is a tome for adventurous academic historians, deep-dive armchair archeologists and neighborhood dive-bar DJs alike.

Cheap to press, and even cheaper to package, the 7" was the format of choice for the scene similarly to the independent and private press soul 45s highlighted in our 2012 Eccentric Soul: Omnibus 7" boxset... and similar to that box and many of these original 7"s, this is a single-press, once in our lifetime compilation.