Depending on where you’re from and where you’ve been, you may be able to imagine a place like Davenport, Fla., which vibrates with the sleepy malaise of suburban sameness. Beige strip-mall storefronts unfurl along the streets. Some have no real names, just signs reading BARBER, TATTOOS, GUNS, TACOS. Davenport is about 35 miles from the center of Orlando, and on the drive the freeway starts to loosen and flow more easily. The atmosphere quiets. The signs of chain restaurants push into the dimming sky.
Outside a cluster of resort homes was a security guard, skeptical but joyfully talkative. I told him I was there to see a band. He asked if I was sure I was in the right place. Based on the landscape beyond the gate, I didn’t feel entirely sure that I was. The place had a Pleasantville eeriness; I could imagine everyone stepping out at the exact same moment to pick up the morning papers. There were rules here, the guard told me, tentatively handing over a visitor’s pass. I had to be out by 10 p.m., no exceptions. I couldn’t park on the street or on the grass. And — he leaned close to my window — no loud music.
Wandering down the dimly lit corridor of homes, it was hard to find addresses, or any distinctive traits at all, until I noticed something that had fallen off a door and was now sitting on a doorstep: a metal sign reading “ROCK-N-ROLL AVE.” This house was the unimaginative container for the brightness and enthusiasm of one of the most talked-about young bands of the past year: the guitarist Téa (pronounced TAY-Uh) Campbell, the lead singer Edith Johnson and the drummer Ada (pronounced ADD-Uh) Juarez, who make up the group Meet Me @ the Altar.
I’d been summoned to see the would-be future of pop-punk, the new queens of noise, the band supposedly destined to drag a whole genre back to its heyday of big choruses and bigger feelings. Pop-punk has a circuitous history, full of sonic shifts and different regional scenes, but it found a peak of influence back in the early and mid-aughts, when bands like Paramore, Fall Out Boy and New Found Glory gave it a glossy sheen and a huge commercial reach, driving untold sales of studded belts and hair dye and getting their best lyrics quoted on untold MySpace profiles. What made that era special, to someone like me, was the way all of pop-punk’s scenes were rising at once — on the radio, on the music-video channels, even on the charts. But then things stalled; the mainstream moment faded; bands broke up or pivoted to different sounds. Soon enough people were looking backward at that moment, sometimes with mild amusement.
The three young women who were expected to change that were sitting in one corner of a sprawling, corporate-looking leather couch on the house’s main floor. The home was one of those prefurnished affairs, with a coffee table that looked too precious to touch and a glass dining table that looked too precious to sit at. The walls were stark white and barren, save for some sparse bacon-themed art. (“We did a thing with Wendy’s, and they sent it to us,” Campbell said, shrugging.) But then, up the stairs, taped onto the walls, were rows and rows of fan letters and fan art — depictions of the band spanning from the cartoonish to the alarmingly realistic.
Before this house, the trio was scattered up and down the East Coast. Campbell is from Davenport, and the band played early shows in Orlando, but Juarez is from North Plainfield, N.J., and Johnson was in Peachtree City, Ga. Their recordings were initially made in separate places and stitched together. Then came a rise that, from the outside, seemed impossibly rapid. First the video for one of their songs, “Garden,” circulated online, catching the attention of pop-punk stalwarts. Then, in the midst of a pandemic, came a deal with the iconic label Fueled by Ramen, and a simmering campaign of hype. They gathered here because they needed to focus on making songs but also on learning how to be a band, in granular ways — ways it can take a band years of playing and touring together to pick up. The house was meant as a type of incubator, a vessel for emotional and creative acceleration.
The members of M.M.A.T.A. have a magnetism that goes far beyond their music making. But the band is still relatively new, and facing high expectations. Watching them on that couch, talking over one another and exploding into laughter, I realized that what some might read as their youthful unawareness of the stakes was really something else. M.M.A.T.A. are a confident band — one that knows exactly where it stands, but hasn’t yet considered the possibility of failure.
At a pizza shop, a few blocks away from the Orlando venue where the band cut its teeth, the 20-year-old Campbell and 22-year-old Juarez gave me the short version of their story.
In the summer of 2015, bored at her grandmother’s house, Campbell went on YouTube, looking for videos of drummers covering songs by TwentyOne Pilots. That search brought her to Juarez, who had built a vast catalog of drum covers on her YouTube channel. “I had no idea where Ada was,” Campbell told me. “To me, she was just on the internet.” Still, Campbell reached out, and they exchanged contacts on the app Kik. They began by covering songs together remotely, sporadically posting the results, until they eventually decided they needed a singer.
Edith Johnson was 14, living in Peachtree City and poking around online — “the beginning of my emo phase,” she says now — when she, too, saw a video posted to Juarez’s YouTube channel. The title was “I’m in a Band, and We Need a Singer.” At the time, Johnson was sinking into the music scene at an Atlanta venue called the Masquerade, whose logo she has since had tattooed on her forearm. She sent in a video of herself singing Paramore’s “All I Wanted.”
Juarez and Campbell, sorting through submissions, narrowed their choices to two. It was 2016, and they posed one question to help them decide: They wanted to know their potential future singer’s preferred political candidate. “At the time,” Juarez told me, “if someone said Hillary and not Bernie, that was a red flag.” Johnson said Hillary, and so — whether or not you think it’s prudent for teenagers who can’t yet vote to make personnel decisions this way — she was rejected.
“I was really angry, actually really mad,” Johnson said. “And I was like, ‘This is wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to be in the band anyway.’ And literally that’s all I thought about, every single day, every single hour, for like two years.”
The issue wasn’t just being in a band, something Johnson could have done easily. It was being in this band, with two girls she saw as at least somewhat like her — the kinds of Black and brown kids sometimes pushed to the margins of punk scenes. For Johnson, joining the band was an obsession, a mission, a destiny. “I texted her literally almost every day,” she said, nodding at Campbell. It was two years later, when things hadn’t worked out with the other singer, that Campbell relented, and the trio was complete.
There is something specifically miraculous about this band’s emergence, something most easily recognized if you are of a certain age — say, a teenager in the early 2000s, when your time around any capital-S Scene would intersect with the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web. An era spent spiraling into message boards and chat rooms, lonely or bored and reaching out into a thrumming wilderness of faceless personas, hoping to brush up against another set of hands that matched enough of your desires to form something that felt like a bond. Someone “like you,” even if all that really meant was someone who loved some of the same songs, or who also felt lousy in her own scene sometimes and wanted to rage and shout. And of course, there were those of us who dreamed of starting our own bands, kicking around names on Instant Messenger with strangers we’d never meet, a thin veil of fantasy laid over the realities of our circumstances.
Meet Me @ the Altar is a thrilling result of a generation beyond all that: kids who grew up communicating on the internet, with one another and with the world, and who could eventually say, “Let’s start a band,” and do it. The internet may seem to become less innocent with each passing hour, but there is still much to be said for what a young person can find on it. Here is a trio of young people who used the internet to its highest exploratory potential, and found one another — and then flourished, reveling in an unfinished but fluorescent version of themselves.
First they posted covers on YouTube. Then they took to the road on small tours. It helped that they had the support of their parents, with each member coming from a musical family. Campbell’s parents met, she says, when her father, a producer, heard a recording of her mother, a singer, and fell in love. Johnson’s family has roots in gospel singing, and Juarez’s father is a drummer from El Salvador; when she was young and learning to play, he was the one to post videos on YouTube. “He just wanted to send them to my family back home,” she says. “He didn’t realize the rest of the internet could see them.”
The girls began gathering in Florida, playing shows at Soundbar in Orlando, where there was enough of a scene for the group to get its bearings, and begin to create a hum of excitement. That hum became a loud buzz in June 2020, when Dan Campbell of the band the Wonder Years tweeted about the song “Garden,” starting a domino effect. Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low also endorsed the band, as did the singer Halsey. At the time, this version of the band’s lineup had just two self-released EPs to its name. But more and more people were getting a first taste of M.M.A.T.A.’s signature experience — the soaring and infectious chorus — and by the end of the month, labels were sending offers.
There was only one label the group had its eye on: Fueled by Ramen, the home of bands, like Paramore, that M.M.A.T.A. idolized. “That was always the goal, the end goal,” Campbell said. “That is what we would have been working toward, to be on Fueled by Ramen. And everything happened so fast that I feel like we didn’t even truly have time to realize, ‘Damn, we’ve been thinking about this since we were 14 years old, and it’s actually happening right now.’”
When news of the band’s signing hit, in October 2020, there was palpable excitement. But much of the talk was about the band’s racial makeup’s being different from that of almost every other act previously pursued by the label. Pop-punk has an image that doesn’t always align with its fan base: The fans, often enough, are young Black people or people of color, or are not male, and yet the face of the genre remains largely white, largely male. This opens the door to a lot of less-than-desirable outcomes, from small things (exhausting repetition of the same lyrical themes) to large ones (men taking advantage of their influence over young fans). Of the many reasons people were excited about M.M.A.T.A., there was also the idea that they could signal a change, a corrective.
M.M.A.T.A. are a band of young women of color who have their horror stories about the ways they’ve occasionally been treated — by peers, by fans, by men working the door. Now these young women of color were being labeled their genre’s saviors, and the predictability of the American imagination was on full display. There are those who are most at ease, most in awe, when the problems in a subsection of American culture are battled by those already most affected by them. It feeds a mythology that marginalized people are acting out of charity, not necessity. M.M.A.T.A. were suddenly expected to save a scene — as opposed to building a newer, more generous one.
“White guilt is something, isn’t it?” Johnson said, grinning slyly, a crescent of pizza crust clasped by her iridescent nails. “If I’m being completely honest, that’s what it was. People were like, ‘Oh, here are all these bands of color!’ And we got to be at the forefront of that. And then, also being women —” She stopped for a split second, just long enough to snap back to a needed clarity. “And,” she said, “we’re also good.”
When I met with M.M.A.T.A., they were riding high off performing a sold-out D.J. set at an emo night in Brooklyn, and were perhaps a little energized about arguing over the fates of their favorite genres. Emo was a commercial force 15 years ago; what did it mean now? Was the pop-punk scene in decline or ripe for resurrection? What parts of it were most worth saving? The need for some kind of pop-punk reconstruction was laid bare outside Soundbar, where one of the band’s friends showed off a new belt from the store Hot Topic, a mecca for generations of the pop-punk/emo set. Campbell tapped the belt’s metallic studs and then turned, incredulous, toward the rest of the band: “Plastic!” she exclaimed. “Hot Topic is using plastic these days!”
“I feel like normies have changed the meaning,” she theorized, back at home, “because they don’t know what it is. Pop-punk didn’t go away. I think the mainstream just stopped paying attention.” Johnson agreed. “There is still a scene,” she said. “There will always be a scene.”
Amid all the talk of M.M.A.T.A. as the saviors of pop-punk, there was significantly less discussion of them as purists of the form. They have a very specific goal, which became clearer as our conversation continued: They want to bring 2008 back. Someone my age might wince at this, but Campbell and Johnson stressed the simplicity of this aim. There were more guitars on the radio back then. M.M.A.T.A. want pop-punk to have another mainstream moment.
They also know that to make that happen, they’ll need to pull from all their creative influences: Johnson’s soaring gospel impulses, Juarez’s affection for bands like Linkin Park and Korn, Campbell’s impeccable ear for pop. Johnson’s melodies, in particular, make you reach for the repeat button; the choruses arrive like sugar and sit long enough before dissolving that you develop a craving for the next one. Earlier in life, she could have sung anything — gospel, R.&B., folk — but she chose to sing pop-punk and infuse every other influence into the way she did it.
At the house, Campbell was talking about “Model Citizen,” the EP the band was preparing to release on its new label. At the time, the record was in a place many artists know well: finished but not yet headed to the public. This left time for the band to get existential about the EP’s thematic concerns. “I think it tells the story,” Campbell said, “of realizing that, like, you’re not really OK.”
The music finds the band expanding but keeping its sonic impulses close, growing new branches from a familiar tree. But there is something viscerally interior about the songs — a kind of curiosity, a surgical and sometimes comical analysis of what can and cannot be felt. So many of this genre’s songs insist on turning up the volume at the edges of feeling, but M.M.A.T.A. seem obsessed with analyzing the absence of feeling, or the awareness that feeling something important might require not feeling good. The record’s first single, “Feel a Thing,” is resigned but playful, a smirking tune about floating between youth and something that is no longer youth, aimless but with big aims. The second, “Brighter Days (Are Before Us),” has an almost evangelical groove, with the band members promising that they have seen the future and it ain’t all bad — they just need to get there, together.
What fascinates most about “Model Citizen” is the way the band seems happy to examine inner terrors and turmoils for its own sake, with anyone listening just along for the ride. As much as coverage of M.M.A.T.A focuses on the members’ youth, they aren’t exactly kids anymore, and they’re not in a position most people who think of themselves as kids are in. They dreamed the impossible and then stepped into it as the world around them was falling into social, political and medical upheaval. It makes sense that “Model Citizen” is taking a magnifying glass to the question of what it means to grow older, and then what it means to grow up.
The members of M.M.A.T.A. may not have time to be as in awe of themselves as others are. The band’s tour schedule, starting in late August, is a sprawling sprint, with 45 shows in less than three months, supporting Coheed and Cambria and the Used’s tour together and then All Time Low’s U.S. and U.K. tour dates.
I soon noticed the clock pushing well past 10 p.m., the time I was told I would be exiled from the neighborhood. On my way out, though, I found myself compelled to ask the broad and boring question: What comes after all the hype? The band members are young, with seemingly endless potential and cultural good will at their disposal. What can be made of it?
They all chimed in. “I want us to be a household name,” Juarez said.
“Like Green Day type [stuff],” Johnson added.
“I want people’s kids to know that they have someone like us to look up to,” Juarez said.
Campbell, who had been nodding along, paused before adding a finer point.
“We want to be the biggest band in the world,” she began. “Not for the fame or the money or any other [expletive], because that doesn’t matter. But for the sole purpose of being able to have a bigger platform so more people can discover us and realize, ‘I have someone who looks like me in this band that I have never seen before.’ That’s all we can ask for at the end of the day, because I’m not getting existential, we’re all going to die one day and what we leave behind is what matters, and if our music and just our existence as a band can change someone’s life ... we just want to pave the way for other bands, so that this is normal.”
With any other band, I might have been cynical about this idea of selfless success that echoes outward. But everything else this band has manifested for itself, and for the world around it, has come true. It makes them easy to believe, and to believe in.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He last wrote about the band the Black Keys.
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