It’s troublesome to elucidate to youthful generations the monumental affect that Fall Out Boy has had on popular culture. At the peak of the band’s superstardom, they had been being hounded by paparazzi, recording within the studio with Jay-Z, and filming music movies with Kim Kardashian. Fall Out Boy didn’t simply quietly introduce the pop-punk and emo scenes into the mainstream — they went full throttle.
For the final twenty years, they have been shaping (and reshaping) the material of the choice music scene with each document they put out. But some of the essential within the band’s personal tapestry is their official debut, Take This to Your Grave, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary on May sixth.
Read extra: Every Fall Out Boy album ranked: From worst to greatest
Sharp, dizzying, and defiantly juvenile, Take This to Your Grave appears to develop extra endearing as time goes on. Uninhibited by the constraints that fame would quickly encompass them with, the Chicago quartet’s first album and the method of making it layed out a story that might form each second of the profession that adopted.
As many followers will bear in mind, Fall Out Boy was fashioned as a result of Pete Wentz was searching for an escape from the shifting tradition within the Chicago hardcore scene that he’d been part of for years. He and his buddy, guitarist Joe Trohman, had been each looking for a way of levity that their different bands (just like the metalcore group Arma Angelus) didn’t present, so that they started assembling a brand new undertaking of their very own. It began to come back collectively, because of an opportunity encounter at a Borders bookstore when Trohman was discussing music with a buddy and a close-by eavesdropper — Patrick Stump — felt compelled to interrupt the dialog and proper him. After bickering about Neurosis, Trohman talked about the band he and Wentz had been engaged on, inspired him to audition (ultimately as a singer as a substitute of a drummer), and the remainder is historical past.
Wentz, who had been viewing this unnamed band as a side-project, acknowledged the second for what it was. “When Patrick sang for the first time, I knew this was very special,” he stated in an interview with Zane Lowe this previous March.
While the group took extra strong form with Stump’s involvement and Wentz and Trohman’s drive to make issues work, everybody knew precisely what was lacking: drummer Andy Hurley. Hurley was no stranger to the early members of FOB (having been in bands like Racetraitor with Wentz), though he was initially bored with becoming a member of and at first solely sometimes crammed in on drums. But it was these moments within the studio with him the place the spark felt larger than ever. So whereas they recorded demos and EPs with out Hurley, nobody felt the band click on till he agreed to come back on full time. That’s partially why 2002’s mini-LP Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out with Your Girlfriend, which technically holds a declare to being the band’s debut, isn’t acknowledged as such. That honor is reserved for the primary document launched with the complete quartet: Take This to Your Grave.
Take This to Your Grave is Fall Out Boy figuring all of it out; easy methods to write lyrics and melodies, easy methods to hone in on a model of pop-punk that didn’t fairly exist but, and easy methods to develop up. Half of the band had been nonetheless youngsters when the album was recorded. Wentz, the oldest member of the group, was in his early 20s. The sound and lyrics captured within the 40-minute runtime mirror the pettiness and ambition of 4 younger folks bursting on the seams, prepared to vary the world. It’s a sentiment wrapped up properly in “Saturday:” “With promise and precision/And mess of youthful innocence.”
The document showcases the group pulling components from their experiences in hardcore and utilizing them to craft one thing fully new. Blending hardcore staples like unclean vocals from Wentz, heart-stopping drumming from Hurley, and energetic guitar riffs from Trohman, together with danceable pop melodies, they had been interesting to each the scene they got here out of and people outdoors of it. Their progressive sound, coupled with Stump’s distinctive vocals and Wentz’s highly effective songwriting, is what set Fall Out Boy on their very own path.
To at the present time, Stump manages to sing his contemporaries underneath the desk with a voice that may fill arenas with ease. Even 20 years in the past, Stump exhibited a vocal energy that was uncommon to seek out, notably in pop-punk. It was at all times there, however together with it was the worry that he can be shamed by the remainder of the scene. “I was really scared,” he informed Zane Lowe earlier this yr. “I hit this falsetto note in rehearsal for and thought, ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ and everyone was like, ‘No, do it.’” For a bunch of people that had been turning into discontent with their former scene, Take This to Your Grave grew to become a secure place to experiment and twist the style round.
Stump credit a lot of that feeling of safety to co-songwriter Pete Wentz. One of essentially the most thrilling features of Take This to Your Grave is listening to the pair’s inventive partnership because it started. Their capacity to jot down collectively has been in comparison with the stuff of legend, just like the partnership between Elton John (who would later collaborate with them) and Bernie Taupin. The dynamic isn’t fairly as fleshed out as it’s on later data, but it surely’s precisely what TTTYG wants it to be. Wentz’s lyrics are melodramatic, intelligent, and are available at you with breakneck pace. “Stop burning bridges and drive off of them,” he snaps within the album’s opening observe, . No one might ship Wentz’s phrases the way in which he does — his voice erupting at precisely the suitable second. There’s an pleasure and curiosity combined with wariness hanging within the air between these two new pals who’re about to go on an incomprehensible journey collectively.
20 years later, that journey remains to be ongoing. While the band lately launched their eighth studio album, it appears now greater than ever that Take This to Your Grave is on their minds. “There’s so many versions of me that puts this record on the top of this list,” Wentz stated after being requested to rank each FOB album in an interview with Kerrang!. On Jan. twenty fifth, 2023 the band performed a shock present at The Metro in Chicago in honor of their new album — the identical place they performed their album launch present 20 years prior. That night time they performed songs from their debut that they hadn’t performed in over a decade, and when Wentz hoisted himself into the group to scream the tip of “Saturday,” face vast with pleasure, one would suppose he was in his early 20s once more.
There’s no arguing at this level that Take This to Your Grave not solely set Fall Out Boy on a path to large success, however helped configure the way forward for pop-punk in a approach that lots have tried to copy and few have managed to attain. When the band speaks in regards to the legacy of their first document, it’s with a mix of triumph and awe. “20 years ago, I told my mom I was going to take a semester off because we were headlining the Metro,” Stump stated on stage in January. “I wanted to see how [the band] worked out. I’m still on that semester I guess.”
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