Photos: Joaquin Cabello

SAN FRANCISCO — Emo legends The Get Up Kids returned to San Francisco after three years Sunday, playing Slim’s with new EP Kicker in hand. The concert was an exercise of satisfaction. The Get Up Kids helped to pioneered the emo sound with nostalgia, joy and melancholy. The band is an ideological leader of its subsequent explosion at the outset of the 2000s. Sunday, the band took fans back to the naive conflicts of adolescence and brought them back, for one night, to a more innocent time.

The show was intense, both in performance and in song content. Despite having the new EP to tour, Matt Pryor and co. didn’t leave out much of their 1999 breakthrough, Something to Write Home About. The band opened with the heart-pumping “Action & Action.” A broken string on Rodrigo Palma’s bass necessitated an earlier-than-planned change of pace, with the melancholic “Out of Reach,” a hymn on which many sang along. The set included early fan favorites like “Shorty” and “Red Letter Day.”

Following an encore break, The Get Up Kids returned to perform “I’m a Loner Dottie, a Rebel;” “I’ll Catch You;” and finally, “Ten Minutes.”

Openers The Casket Lottery provided a similar nostalgic trip back to the return to the late ’90s. The band’s set was wide-ranging and loaded with cuts like “Code Red,” off 2002’s Survival is for Cowards and “New Year’s Eve,” from 1999’s Choose Bronze.

Follow photographer Joaquin Cabello at Instagram.com/joaquinxcabello.