There is a version of emo music that most people never hear — the version that doesn’t care if you sing along, that isn’t interested in your playlist, that exists only to make you sit in your car after you’ve parked and stare at nothing for five minutes.
“Limousine” is that version.
Based on the real-life death of seven-year-old Katie Flynn — killed by a drunk driver on Long Island after serving as flower girl at a wedding — the song tells the story from three perspectives: the mother in the back of the limo, the drunk driver, and the child herself. Jesse Lacey’s vocal shifts from whispered horror to full-throated anguish, and the bridge repeats seven times. Once for each year of her life.
The production on The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was famously tortured — the band scrapped and re-recorded the album multiple times. But “Limousine” arrived almost fully formed, as if the weight of its subject matter demanded immediate, unrevised expression. The guitars don’t so much build as accumulate grief. The rhythm section, usually the engine of Brand New’s post-hardcore momentum, here becomes something slower and more deliberate — a funeral procession.
“The bridge repeats seven times. Once for each year of her life.”
This is not a song you put on casually. This is a song you go to when you need to feel something so enormous that your own problems shrink by comparison. It is seven minutes and forty-two seconds of proof that rock music, at its best, can hold the unbearable and make it into something you can survive hearing.
The Devil and God contains other astonishing songs. “Jesus Christ,” “Handcuffs,” “Sowing Season” — each is essential. But “Limousine” is the one that Brand New fans point to when someone asks what the band was capable of at their peak. The answer is: this. Exactly this.