Jimmy Eat World are synonymous with emo’s third wave, a movement that pushed the intensely earnest hardcore offshoot away from raw, scrappy sounds toward massive pop hooks wrapped around introspective lyrics and chugging guitars. That’s an association the Arizona band earned honestly: Both their riff-heavy 2001 LP Bleed American and its signature hit “The Middle,” a power-pop-leaning pep talk to anyone feeling lost or downtrodden, presaged the mid-2000s rise of bands such as Fall Out Boy and Paramore. A pair of childhood friends, vocalist Jim Adkins and drummer Zach Lind, formed Jimmy Eat World in 1993 with guitarist Tom Linton. Although their early songs tended toward straightforward pop-punk, the group started expanding into more aggressive post-hardcore on 1996’s Static Prevails and atmospheric, pristine post-rock on the 1999 fan favorite Clarity. Following the profile-raising success of Bleed American, Jimmy Eat World kept pushing their sound forward, dabbling in bracing emo-punk (the existential Futures), piano and orchestral flourishes (Chase This Light), and atmospheric rock (Integrity Blues). No wonder that after the release of 2019’s stellar Surviving, Adkins told Apple Music, “The standard that we’ve set for ourselves now gets higher and higher every album we do.”