It’s a nippy Thursday night and Fall Out Boy are blasting the roof off of a Central London basement bar.
They’re rolling through their rollicking new single, ‘Heartbreak Feels So Good’, which is an angst-ridden anthem with lyrics highlighting the fact that ‘[they] could cry a little, cry a lot / cry later or cry now / [they] know it’s heartbreak’. Patrick Stump is wearing a baseball cap, Pete Wentz is looking dashing, and a thousand die-hard fans are screaming every word back into the faces of these American emo heroes.
Later, they’ll blast through a selection of hits so omnipresent, you’d think they were piped into maternity wards up and down the land. ‘Tnks Fr Th Mmrs’, ‘Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down’, ‘Dance Dance’, and ‘Centuries’ are duly aired, before the band departs in a flurry of waves, smiles, and promises to ‘see us again soon’.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is a scene from a mid-Noughties Warped Tour reunion; or, perhaps, a documentary about the ‘good old days’ of American emo-rock.
But alas, dear reader, it’s not 2005. It’s 2023, and Fall Out Boy are back.
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You may be wondering how we got here.
It’s simple, really. As part of the promotional run for their (excellent) new album So Much (for) Stardust, Fall Out Boy are playing an intimate show at London’s 1200-capacity Heaven. Oh, and to top it all off, they’re playing a setlist that’s packed full of deep cuts, fan favourites, and just a few of the bonafide rock classics that bear their name.
And that’s about as good as it gets, really, isn’t it?
After all, it’s easy to forget how many stone-cold bangers Patrick Stump and co. have popped out over the years. Sure, you have the aforementioned ‘Tnks Fr The Mmrs’, ‘Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down’, ‘Dance Dance’, and ‘Centuries’ – but who are we to forget about ‘My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark’, ‘Una Thurman’, and ‘Grand Theft Autumn / Where Is Your Boy’?
But that’s not to diminish, of course, the sheer excellence of the cuts they share from So Much (for) Stardust. To say that it’s Fall Out Boy at their very best would be little more than lazy journalism – but it would, unfortunately, also be accurate. The new songs shared tonight – including new album highlight, ‘Love From The Other Side’ – are as good as anything the Chicago-born rockers have ever penned and are greeted by the crowd with the same rabid acclaim as anything from their back catalogue.
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Sure, it may not be 2005 – but who cares, really?
Fall Out Boy are back and better than ever – and, based on the size of the smiles on their faces throughout the duration of this teensy-tiny London show, they’ve never felt better about it.