Jesse Lacey co-founded Taking Back Sunday with guitarist Eddie Reyes in Amityville, New York, in November 1999. He started as a guitarist and moved to bass when John Nolan joined. Then Nolan reportedly romanced Lacey's girlfriend at a party, and Lacey left. That personal rupture is the origin point of the most productive feud early-aughts emo ever produced, and if you want to understand why both "Your Favorite Weapon" and "Tell All Your Friends" hit as hard as they do, you have to start there.

Lacey formed Brand New in Long Island in 2000 with bassist Garrett Tierney and drummer Brian Lane, and shortly afterward brought in guitarist Vincent Accardi. The four of them recorded "Your Favorite Weapon" with producer Mike Sapone, a friend of the band. It came out October 9, 2001, on Triple Crown Records. The album runs twelve tracks. "Seventy Times 7" is track nine. You know what it's about. Lacey knew you'd know what it's about. That was the whole point.

Taking Back Sunday signed with Victory Records in December 2001 and went straight into Big Blue Meenie Recording Studio in Jersey City, New Jersey, with producer Sal Villanueva. Two weeks. That's how long it took to cut "Tell All Your Friends," which landed March 26, 2002. Victory pushed Villanueva on the band because he had just worked on Thursday's "Full Collapse" for the same label. TBS didn't know him before that introduction, which means the sonic fingerprints of the broader New Jersey and New York scene were already on the board before Lazzara sang a note. The lineup in that room was Lazzara on vocals, Nolan on guitar and keys, Eddie Reyes on guitar, Shaun Cooper on bass, and Mark O'Connell on drums. The response to Lacey's "Seventy Times 7" came in the form of "There's No 'I' in Team," a direct callout with a specificity that, as Stereogum once noted, you don't often see outside of rap. "Head Club," the album's closing track, was Nolan being exhausted with writing about Lacey at all. Even the exhaustion became a song.

Here is the thing that gets underplayed in every retelling of this story. Both records are genuinely great, and they're great in ways that are inseparable from the conflict that produced them. "Your Favorite Weapon" is pop punk that runs on wounded pride and lyricism that outpaces its genre. All of the songs were written during the band's teenage years, according to Accardi, and every one of them sounds like someone who knows exactly what he's doing with language while pretending he doesn't care. "Jude Law and a Semester Abroad" became the album's most popular song, but the emotional core is the fury underneath the hooks. "Soco Amaretto Lime" closes it with something quieter and more devastating. The whole record is a document of a kid who got burned and decided to write his way out of it. "Tell All Your Friends" is tighter and more combative, a record built for a room full of people who already know the context. "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut From The Team)" and "You're So Last Summer" are two of the most precise pop-punk songs the era produced, and they carry the weight of people who have something to prove. The album entered the Billboard Top 200 and eventually sold over a million copies worldwide. That's not a footnote. That's the scene breaking out.

What makes the TBS and Brand New story worth revisiting past the gossip is the summer 2002 tour. Both bands, diss tracks and all, went out on the road together alongside Rufio. A week or two in, Taking Back Sunday joined Brand New onstage during "Seventy Times 7," and Lacey returned the favor for "There's No 'I' in Team." The two bands sang each other's callout songs together in front of crowds that had memorized every word. Shows sold out. Venues upgraded. Nolan later said it was the first tour where the members came home with actual money. The feud was real, but so was the scene that held both bands, and the scene was bigger than the beef. That summer tour is the proof.

The two records belong in the same conversation because they are the same conversation, conducted in public, in real time, across two debut albums released five months apart. They came from the same geography, the same personal history, and the same instinct that feelings are worth shouting about. The Long Island emo scene at that moment was small enough that a falling-out between friends became the subject matter for two of its most important records. That's a scene working exactly the way scenes are supposed to work, turning private damage into shared noise.