One night every year at the University of Texas at Dallas, a swarm of students descends on the center of campus – cloaked in leather, heavy eyeliner and nostalgia – for an evening of music known as Emo Nite. This year marked the fifth annual event, held Thursday, Nov. 20 in the Student Union.
Unlike typical campus events that offer free food and quiet study spaces, Emo Nite transformed the entire main lobby of the Student Union into an energetic concert venue.
Emo Nite began shortly after the founding of Strings Attached, the music-oriented student organization that runs the show. The club’s founder, Carlos Jong, said its creation in December 2019 stemmed partly from the lack of broad music clubs on campus.
“There used to be clubs, [for] like, music, [they were] very niche, very specific,” Jong said.
The first Emo Nite was held in October 2021 and was inspired by a similar concert Jong attended in downtown Dallas. Since then, the event has taken place near the end of every fall semester at UT Dallas’ Plinth – indoors to the Student Union lobby only when rain forces a change of venue, as it did this year.
This year’s Emo Nite ran from 6:30 to 10 p.m., making the concert last almost four hours. Every song played on stage during those four hours was sung and had instruments played by UT Dallas students.
One reason so many performers make it onto the lineup is Strings Attached’s inclusive audition philosophy.
“If it’s like a member’s… first time at the club and it’s their only song or something, [we] try to put at least one song from everybody into a concert,” current Strings Attached president James McKinney said.
The musical variety was just as broad as the performer list. String Attached member Nicole Burns noted that while they still had traditional early 2000s classics like Panic! At the Disco, they have expanded the genres included in the concert to contain some metal and hardcore songs.
The stage on which the students performed this year featured a large metal truss installed by a UT Dallas alumnus who now runs Audio Patchworks, an audio production business. The truss was rigged with a variety of colored lights, set up to flash in sync with the drum hits.
Pulling off an event of this scale is no simple task. “Timing is a massive, massive part of it,” Burns said. “Keeping everything sequential can sometimes be a challenge, especially with just how quick we turn things around, but we like to think we’ve…gotten it down to a science at least a little bit.”
McKinney also highlighted the behind-the-scenes crew members of Strings Attached who ran the technology, mixed audio, and recorded the show. “They basically make the show,” he said.
Burns explains that this concert also serves as a stress reliever to students. “There’s a lot of stressors and things kind of going on. So having a space to just kind of express yourself, be active, jump around, sing songs that, you know, evoke a sense of nostalgia,” Burns said. While screaming at a concert can be its own form of expression, its appeal likely comes from more than the act itself.
Held shortly before Thanksgiving and winter break, Emo Nite also serves as an unofficial send-off for the semester – a final chance for students to gather before the campus empties out. In this sense, Emo Nite is like a last hurrah for a semester that is coming to a close. This sense of community aligns with something Burns noted about Strings Attached’s mission: “We are a place for anybody, regardless of if they just picked up a guitar [or if] they’ve been playing for 10 years…we are here to provide a space for that creativity.”
