Let's Rank Every Fall Out Boy Album

B-Side Collection's Summer of Distractions

Jul 09, 2024

Good morning, I’m sorry, how have you been since…three years ago? Wow.

In case you have forgotten, my name is John Bazley and this is B-Side Collection, the newsletter I started in 2020 when I was fairly certain that I had days left to live at any given moment and was afraid I would die unpublished. In 2020 and 2021, I used this platform to publish a handful of essays about music. I had lofty ambitions for B-Side Collection, but like all things in 2020, plans shifted, and I spent a lot of the time I had earmarked for writing instead looking at the ceiling and berating myself internally for all of my regrets.

What has happened since then? I’ve moved…let’s see…twice. The ceiling in my first Ocean Grove apartment famously collapsed on my desk, destroying it in the process (and with the space of time, I have decided to forgive myself for how that insane event affected my writing). Our landlord immediately revealed herself to be a maniac during that situation, so Jo and I packed up and moved to a different, much larger apartment (one might even call it a small house) in Ocean Grove, and I reluctantly got a job as a high school teacher to afford it. In September, we moved again, this time to the lovely neighborhood of Ditmas Park in Brooklyn, NY. I’m teaching English at a public high school here in the city.

It is strange and exciting to be back in Brooklyn. When I moved away in 2019, I told myself that I would never return. I swore it to myself, in fact, as I crossed the Verrazzano from Staten Island to New Jersey in a U-Haul. If you have lived here, you know how hard it can be. It takes an unbelievable amount of energy to do basic, fundamental-for-living things here. But I have learned to love it, appreciate it more this time. Perhaps it is the years spent in a ceiling-collapsed shoebox in Monmouth County that has made me appreciate the expanse of Brooklyn sprawl; perhaps it is the view from the Q train as it crosses into Manhattan, the skyscrapers kissed by sunlight, the helicopters and ferries and tourists smiling and taking pictures from inside the traincar every time.

Realistically, it is probably the fact that I now have a union-negotiated salary with incredible benefits and two months off in the summer. This year, I have decided to dedicate my summer vacation to writing a book (or, to be kind to myself and not hold unrealistic expectations, a very detailed book proposal with several mostly-complete sections). I am really excited about this project. It is the first time I’ve had an outline for a book-length project and really, unquestioningly believed in it.

But it turns out that it’s actually hard to write a book. It’s also very easy for me to slip into depression and anxiety without a daily work schedule, so I have a hard time “taking time off” from writing, which I have convinced myself is my real job at the moment. I have decided to revive this newsletter as a platform for lower-stakes writing that will keep me focused and generative this summer. I am calling this series B-Side Collection’s Summer of Distractions.

With that, there is simply one possible place to start: ranking and discussing every Fall Out Boy album.

A disclaimer

Please note that the following ranking represents my feelings toward the discography of Fall Out Boy as it stands today. My ranking of albums has changed wildly over the years, it will likely change again between my writing this and your reading it.

A brief celebration of Evening Out With Your Girlfriend

I think I could leave this album off the list entirely and most readers wouldn’t notice, while the ones who did wouldn’t care. I don’t think anyone seriously1 argues that Evening Out With Your Girlfriend is anything better than the band’s worst album, but it’s also the only one released before the classic Pete Wentz, Patrick Stump, Joe Trohman, Andy Hurley lineup was solidified, so it also hardly counts. If nothing else, this album is easy to ignore.

I will however say that “Honorable Mention” has sounded great every time it’s been pulled out during live shows (particularly during that very cool rarity medley they played during the small venue reunion tour in 2013 and even as a full track performance earlier this year).

8. Mania

Mania is the only Fall Out Boy album I harbor genuinely bad feelings toward. It is far more bad than good, and the bad is really bad.

I recently read Fall Out Boy lead guitarist Joe Trohman’s memoir and he goes pretty far out of his way to describe this album the product of a band in crisis who did not know where to go next or what kind of music they were supposed to play. Trohman writes that he excused himself album’s creation after his initial batch of ideas for the record were rejected by Stump and Wentz, the creative core of the band, and doesn’t that just tell the whole story? Fall Out Boy’s Lennon and McCartney, two albums deep into a very successful reunion era, vastly over-thinking what kind of music they needed to make to maintain their current level of success, kicking the lead guitarist out of the sessions in order to chase what Fall Out Boy was supposed to make next, as if that conclusion could possibly be drawn without the input of a core band member? The lack of focus and cohesion shows on essentially every track here.

I think “Young and Menace” is among the band’s worst songs, and might be the only time the band felt a step behind the cutting edge rather two steps ahead of it. Pete is on the record as saying that the idea for the track came from a desire to reinvent the band’s sound, which suggests that “let’s make something weird” came out ahead of “we are fans of EDM” in the writing process. It is very clear what they were going for, but they didn’t have the chops to successfully execute it, which leaves me wondering why I’d listen to “Young and Menace” instead of any given successful EDM artist.

The single track on here that I really love is “Bishops Knife Trick,” a ballad that showcases Patrick’s vocal abilities. It is my love for that track and a passing enjoyment of “Heaven’s Gate” and “Wilson” that put Mania above Evening Out, which doesn’t hit the same highs in its runtime (which can be forgiven for the fact that it was made by teenagers, not 30-year-old millionaires).

7. American Beauty/American Psycho

I feel most gracious toward American Beauty/American Psycho when I consider that it released less than two years after Save Rock and Roll. I look at this album primarily as a momentum move, an album designed to keep the name Fall Out Boy alive in the headlines of the music press after Save Rock and Roll successfully revived it. It was the job of this album to keep the train rolling, not rebuild the tracks, and at that, it succeeded.

But this was the first Fall Out Boy album that ever really let me down. Nearly every song on this album feels like a Save Rock and Roll B-side, while the admittedly very catchy “Uma Thurman,” with its sample-heavy composition and EDM feel, looks, in retrospect, like a clear line from this mildly disappointing release to the train wreck of Mania.

Sadly, we also need to talk about the title track, which is the most confusing thing Fall Out Boy (maybe any rock band? it’s up there!) has ever released. The song is, in a word, annoying. It samples “Too Fast For Love” by Motley Crue, and was clearly composed to beat the “Fall Out Boy is a radio rock band without guitars or drums now” allegations that swarmed around Save Rock and Roll. The end result is a track so discordant and unpleasant that doesn’t really serve the radio audience the rest of the album mostly caters to, nor the punk kids who were clamoring for a song that sounds like it could have fit on From Under The Cork Tree. To my ears, the song shows the cracks that eventually go on to burst in the Mania era, even if the rest of the album is mostly a completely fine, pleasant listening experiences of songs that maybe verge too closely to Maroon 5 territory on occasion.

6. Save Rock and Roll

I will admit with over ten years of distance that Save Rock and Roll could have sounded like anything and I would have been head over heels for it. The famed 2013 reunion album was simply something you needed to be there for. After four years of a “hiatus” that many fans believed was actually more likely a permanent break-up, the band returned with a tour, a new single (with a title that could not be more signature Fall Out Boy: “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)”), and an album titled Save Rock and Roll.

The title of the album is, of course, insane. It feels tailor-made to piss off the Dave Grohls of the world during a time in pop music culture when we were all debating the artistic merits of Macklemore and licking our wounds inflicted by Ryan Murphy and his weapon called Glee. The album is unmistakably a pop record that uses the textures of distorted guitars and analog drums like skins over synthesizers and drum machines. I don’t think this is a bad thing! If you do (many did in 2013), you will not like Save Rock and Roll, and I would argue that you will not get what makes Save Rock and Roll so clever.

Looking back through the old archives, I called this my 8th favorite album of the year in 2013. Today, I don’t think it’s as good as I did back then. It shares issues with American Beauty/American Psycho and Mania in that it is clear that many of the songs were written with the intention of getting a surprised reaction out of the listener rather than doing something that will stand the test of time—looking at you, “The Mighty Fall (feat. Big Sean).”

But it was by far the best post-hiatus album until Stardust (more on that later) for its direction, ambition, and the fact that it just sounded felt like a Fall Out Boy album. There is a reason this band is so beloved, and it exists somewhere in between the music itself and the mythology surrounding the band. How did this group of kids from the Chicago hardcore punk scene get to be so famous? Save Rock and Roll, its ridiculous title, Elton John and Courtney Love guest appearances, and the fact that the final track is an indulgent in-joke that samples Stump’s own vocals from the bridge of Take This To Your Grave’s “Chicago is So Two Years Ago” contribute to that mythology, and that, to me, is Fall Out Boy at its best.

5. From Under The Cork Tree

I’m not the Cork Tree fan that many people I know are. I would guess for most casual fans of the band, this is their signature work, the vessel that launched “Sugar We’re Going Down” and “Dance, Dance” across the country’s airwaves and made Pete Wentz into an overnight celebrity. It was certainly my entry point into the band, as it’s one of the first iTunes Store purchases I made2.

I think this album is very good, but it sits in a strange place in the overall discography. It’s a clear step up in ambition from its predecessor Take This To Your Grave, an album that is mostly concerned with being a very good pop-punk album, but it’s not nearly as interested in charting new territory as its followup, Infinity on High. It’s probably the best example of Fall Out Boy As Emo Band, with its intense melodrama and sentence-long song titles. Patrick is doing a lot of emo-style inflections in the vocals here, and he’s not quite the powerhouse vocalist he’d soon become. There is a part of me that believes the image of the band as portrayed in the “Sugar” music video—which is to say a bunch of college-aged kids who just spent their major album advance on new clothes at the mall—is the national, imagined image of the band to this day.

Still, there is some solid gold on this album. As a teacher of high school seniors, it is nearly impossible for me to imagine nineteen-year-old Patrick Stump writing the absurdly catchy chorus melody of “Nobody Puts Baby In The Corner.” We also have “I’ve Got A Dark Alley And A Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (Summer Song),” which shows the band at perhaps the most organic they’ve ever sounded and serves as an introduction to Patrick’s lower vocal register, something he’d later hone and master to great effect throughout his career. The flare for the dramatic is also present on “Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name Of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued” and “XO,” each of which show a band beginning to grow aware of the fact that the studio itself can be used as an instrument.

While Cork Tree is far from the best album in the band’s catalogue, it’s arguably most important. Still, when I’ve craved “Old Fall Out Boy” this year, it’s not the one I’ve reached for. That honor goes to…

4. Take This To Your Grave

A younger, more naive version of myself would have put TTTYG far closer to the bottom of this list for its relative lack of ambition. There is an obvious shift in aims between this album, a fairly standard though immaculately produced and extremely catchy pop-punk album, and Cork Tree, which is arguably the record that established bar for style and execution that Fall Out Boy goes on to be known for. But I have been listening to this album a lot lately (in a year where I have almost exclusively listened to Fall Out Boy, this album is my most-played) and I see the light now.

I read Sellout by Dan Ozzi recently and a through line in that book is that the bands who went on to escape DIY hell and have a moderately good time in the major label circuit are the ones who were born with an ability to write a hook and discern between verse and chorus melodies. It is hard not to think of that while listening to the hits, namely “Dead On Arrival,” “Grand Theft Autumn (Where Is Your Boy),” and “Saturday.” But what makes the album great and why I give it the edge over Cork Tree is how special and frankly earnest the deeper cuts are. I think I have “Chicago Is So Two Years Ago” in my top five (maybe top ten, don’t make me sit here and figure this out) overall Fall Out Boy tracks, and “Grenade Jumper” is my this-week-favorite; both of these tracks are rare gems in the FOB discography for the fact that there is hardly a tongue in a cheek in these lyrics. As the band exploded in popularity after this album, their unlikely fame and the pressures it brought about became increasingly the subject matter of their music and Pete Wentz’ lyricism became increasingly aware of this spotlight. In light of this, there’s a darker edge on Cork Tree that doesn’t quite work as well for me as the tracks here about a perennial neighborhood pickup truck or directly thanking the fans of the band (all of whom were known by name) for coming to shows.

3. So Much (for) Stardust

2023’s So Much (for) Stardust) is an accomplishment. If Mania is the perennial example of a band in crisis, unsure of what they are supposed to be, Stardust is a perfect example of a band that has just woken up and remembered. It is a best-case-scenario album from a band over 20 years into their career, whose greatest creative achievements were followed closely by dramatic crises. I try to lead with gratitude in my music listening these days, and every time I listen to this album, I am flooded with that thankful feeling.

Please forgive me because we are going to have to talk about Mania again for a moment. I love Save Rock and Roll, but in retrospect, that album served as a canary in the coal mine for how the band would interact with the general, non-Fall-Out-Boy-obsessed public during the post-hiatus era. “Light Em Up” became a Sports Center classic, which led to the carbon copies in “Immortals” and “Champion” on American Beauty and Mania respectively. The tongue-in-cheek attitude of the Save Rock in Roll era can be clearly traced through to the subsequent albums’ defiant, self-critical, and hell-bent-on-reinvention spirit. Like a reflection of a reflection, the details eventually get warped, and we are left with “Young and Menace” where “Save Rock and Roll” once stood. I think there is no better symbol of this than Mania’s purple color palette in the album cover and music videos, a reference to the fact that all of Fall Out Boy’s prior album covers (accidentally?) alternated between red and blue color schemes. Purple, thought Pete Wentz, is something new entirely, right?

So Much (for) Stardust shows the band throwing out notions of what the band “should” sound like and getting back to making music primarily as a four-piece unit with Cork Tree, Infinity, and Folie a Deux producer Neal Avron on the boards. The result is an album that simply sounds like Fall Out Boy. Andy Hurley is unmistakably back on the drums, delivering his most exciting material since Folie. Joe Trohman, by his own account in his memoir, was more involved in the songwriting process than he had been since Folie. The result is an urgent, guitar-driven album that perfectly accompanies Patrick Stump’s career-best vocal work and Pete Wentz’s lyricism that finally seems to have escaped from the prison of celebrity. “Fake Out” is the immediate standout (how was this song not a single?) to this effect; a mix of thumping drums and a blend of acoustic and electric guitars fill the room with Stump hitting a flawless falsetto in the chorus: love is in the air / I just gotta figure out a window to break out / buried alive inside my dream / but it was all a fake out.

The showstopper, in my humble opinion, is “The Kintsugi Kid (Ten Years),” a song about the hazy passage of time and the bliss that accompanies breaking out of a decade-long slog. I adore this song, with a second verse I sometimes play over and over for minutes at a time. Passed my old street, the house I grew up in / It breaks your heart, but four of the Ramones are dead. I think about this lyric every day. The house I grew up in was recently leveled. My parents sold it and moved away, and whoever bought it was mostly just interested in the land anyway, and now it is rubble, or at least it was the last time I saw it, which was months ago, and I cannot imagine the way it looked when I last saw it, a pile of dirt where a house used to be, without thinking about how things could have been different, all the numb years spent in that house, all of the books I read in my bedroom, the records I played too loud, how have so many years passed, I wonder, how can I begin to count those years in numbers that feel flat and insufficient to carry their weight, and I remember a year ago at a bar I won’t name in Asbury Park when I saw some kids I went to high school with across the space and in the interest of their privacy and dignity I won’t name them either, and I couldn’t believe how old they were, they looked like they could have been someone’s parents, and maybe they were, and I suppose I could be too, though I am not, nor do I particularly wish to be, though I occasionally wonder when I’m on the subway and listening to music alone what I have done with this life, what will be left of me aside from a pile of dirt where a house once was.

2. Infinity on High

We are in toss-up territory now. I don’t think a single similar band today has what it takes to make Infinity On High, a functionally perfect record, the album that I believe best embodies the spirit of Fall Out Boy. You are well aware of “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs,” I’m sure, and if you are one of my people, you also probably know “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race.” While not quite Fall Out Boy at their glossiest, this record is pretty close. I can’t think of a bigger-sounding pop-punk song than “This Ain’t A Scene,” a song that feels special-designed to piss off the users of AbsolutePunk.net in 2007.

Experimentation is standard for Fall Out Boy, but execution can be a bit more rare. This album is nothing if not perfectly executed. The band famously worked with powerhouse R&B producer and songwriter Babyface on this one, an inspired choice that dramatically expanded the sonic landscape the band was capable of painting. I can’t remember who said it, but I always think about this analysis of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” wherein the song is described as a hardcore fan trying to write a pop song. The end result is grunge, something new entirely, a testament to the power of perspective in writing. Incidentally, another product of hardcore fans trying to write pop songs is the band Fall Out Boy, who pull off that trick of making something new and expansive most effectively on this album. Is there another song that sounds like “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs?” What about “You’re Crashing, But You’re No Wave?” There are a lot of songs that sound like “I’m Like A Lawyer With The Way I’m Always Trying to Get You Off (Me and You), but none of them also sound like Fall Out Boy songs3. Infinity on High finds the band fully matured, more capable from a songwriting (and let’s face it, financial) standpoint of realizing their ambitions of creating something new, being the type of band that didn’t exist before and hasn’t existed since.

1. Folie à Deux

Folie à Deux is a masterpiece. This is clear to me because I didn’t care for it when it released in 2008, and now I am unsure how that was ever the case aside from the obvious conclusion that I was simply not ready for it at the time.

There is a lot about Folie à Deux that pushes the listener away. The album cover, through a certain set of eyes, is abhorrent. “I Don’t Care” is an insane choice for a first single from the band that just set the world on fire with “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs,” and the second single, “America’s Suitehearts” is, for my money, the worst song on the album. The music videos for both of these songs are strange and surreal, and do not seem to make any attempt to court new fans of the band, while making several choices that may actively push existing fans away. In his memoir, Trohman blames the label for the record’s initial poor reception. He’s vague about it aside from mentioning that “I Don’t Care” was released too far ahead of the album, but it is worth noting that the album was delayed mid-rollout. It was initially supposed to release days before the 2008 presidential election, and the band decided to theme the entire promotional strategy around an Election Day motif.4 The album got pushed back several weeks into December, a deadzone for album releases that misses Black Friday and prevents much consideration in the magazines’ end of year lists, while also making the entire promo campaign look kind of stupid and irrelevant. Thus, Folie à Deux lands in the laps of America at the end of a tumultuous year without much of anyone caring.

The nightmarish production of Folie is famous, and you can read all about it somewhere else; if you are unfamiliar, it is essentially the pop-emo version of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, except the end product wasn’t immediately heralded as a classic and instead, people stood front row at the Folie tour dates, and per the band in several statements over the years, gave them the middle finger every time they played one of their new songs.

You have to remember that this was the era when most people who listened to music had to find themselves possessed to go to a store and purchase an album, and how foolish we were not to do that when the first song is “Disloyal Order of Water Buffalos,” a track so grand and immediate in setting the parameters of what the subsequent hour of music will be that it should be studied in every songwriting program across the nation. The track works with the famous three-chord progression of The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly,” a decision so absurdly self-indulgent that it demands the band’s best work to justify its audacity. Patrick wails “Boycott love” in the chorus, a declaration that serves as a ruleset for the album that follows, the only album in Fall Out Boy’s career that does not broach the subject of romantic love in its lyrics at all. Instead, Wentz’s lyrics are mostly concerned with death and legacy, anxiety and the feeling of coming apart, reckoning with his increasing distaste for his band members (who, in a Rumours-esque fashion, are the ones singing and playing the songs), and contending with the poisons of notoriety. If the album were to be retitled (and frankly, it should have been), I think the chorus of “She’s My Winona” would do the trick: “Hell or glory, I don’t want anything in between.”

Folie is the most challenging and rewarding record in the band’s catalogue. The overindulgent “What a Catch, Donnie” features a medley of guests including Elvis Costello singing the choruses of each of Fall Out Boy’s singles. As if to spit on its own legacy, the album continues with “27,” Wentz’ angry, bitter, and self-righteous ode to maintaining the image of his own genius when his poor mental health and substance use are clearly tearing the band apart. Lil Wayne, who you may remember as a pariah of rock music fans in 2008, appears in the bridge of the avant garde pop track “Tiffany Blews.” There is no way to view “20 Dollar Nose Bleed” as anything other than a show tune laced with amphetamines, its sickly sweetness on full display in a chorus where a Broadway-ready Stump demands the audience “call me Mr. Benzedrine.”

Lately, I have been considering the parallels between this record and Bob Fosse’s 1979 film All That Jazz, a movie about Joe Gideon, a drug-addicted choreographer coming apart at the seams and hurdling himself toward death as he meticulously whittles away at two enormous creative projects: a film about a stand-up comedian, and a major Broadway musical. The trick of the movie is a sequence in the second act when Gideon shows a work-in-progress performance from the musical to its financiers. The performance is so utterly astounding, so perfect and shocking and exciting in its execution, that the film’s central conceit—that perfection and obsession come at the cost of everything else—immediately becomes believable. Folie à Deux’s final track, “West Coast Smoker,” mirrors the finale of All That Jazz, its “Bye Bye Life” sequence. Just as Joe Gideon gives into his addiction in a manically staged performance where he bids farewell to everything he has ever loved and despised, Folie a Deux goes out with Stump dueting with Debbie Harry in the chorus: Oh hell yes / I’m a nervous wreck / Oh hell yes / The drugs just make me reset / Knock once for the Father / twice for the Son / three times for the Holy Ghost.

Do you agree with my rankings? Am I wrong about Cork Tree? Is Mania good actually? Please let me know. Of course you can find me here, but I’m also on Instagram, Letterboxd, and (gasp) Threads. Thank for you providing me with the space to distract myself this summer. Maybe next week we will talk about My Chemical Romance or something.

B-Side Collection