Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
50. Orchid (601 plays)
Top track (91 plays): Le Desordre C’est Moi, from Chaos Is Me (1999)

I always thought the first two tracks to Orchid’s debut album would make amazing final boss battle music for a video game. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but I did first take an interest in screamo and related genres on a defunct video game forum that had awkwardly evolved into an informal music-sharing site. (The same one I met Arleigh and and pantsukudasai56 on.) A friend of mine there who would go on to become the vocalist for Mesa Verde was really getting into the genre around the same time that I was first exploring black metal, and we traded a lot of recommendations. It’s made the recent surge of screamo-black metal cross-over bands like Liturgy and Deafheaven peculiarly nostalgic for me.

Orchid was a short-lived but especially influential band in the scene, lasting from 1998 until 2002. Most of its members went on to form the really solid and entirely out of character rock band Panthers afterwards. I will be eternally amused that Jayson Green noticed my Orchid shirt at one of their gigs.