Fall Out Boy’s Save Rock and Roll at 10: a boundary-defying album that brought rock into the future

There was no better way to end Fall Out Boy’s four-year hiatus than with the release of “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)” — aggressively assertive, foreboding yet triumphant, with wailing riffs, catchy vocal hooks, and, well, lots of fire. But the following album, Save Rock And Roll, proved that not only were Fall Out Boy back, but they were sticking around, and they were committed to growing.

Coming off hiatus put Fall Out Boy in the contrasting position of being both an older band but also a new one — a position that ended up setting the tone for their first record back. In a Tumblr post, Fall Out Boy described what struck them about the photo they ended up choosing for Save Rock And Roll’s album artwork: “It really solidified what we were trying to get across on the record — the idea of old and new clashing. Tradition and change coming together.” 

Read more: 15 of Fall Out Boy’s heaviest songs of all time, ranked

Those themes come across in the lyrics, especially in the lines that blur the past and future. “I’ve got the scars from tomorrow,” vocalist Patrick Stump sings on “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark” after declaring, “The war is won/Before it’s begun” on “The Phoenix.” “Where Did The Party Go” captures that anachronism in the lyrics, “Silent film stars stuck in talking cinema life,” which parallel the experience of a band that fears having become outdated in a musical culture that has changed since they were last a part of it. 

Adding to that concern of becoming irrelevant, anxiety about aging permeates the songs. The most striking example comes from “Where Did the Party Go”: “We were the kids who screamed/‘We weren’t the same’/In sweaty rooms/Now we’re doomed to organizing walk-in closets like tombs” — it’s a stereotypical portrait of getting further into adulthood, cut through with a fear of losing what made you stand out.

Following Fall Out Boy tradition, there are plenty of references to the band’s catalog. The title track interpolates “Chicago Is So Two Years Ago.” It also contains the line, “I will defend the faith/Going down swinging,” an obvious nod to one of Fall Out Boy’s most popular songs, “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” and an apparent commitment to stay true to the band’s beginnings, in a song dedicated to rock music. On “Rat A Tat,” Stump sings, “Are you ready for another bad poem?” referencing the inclusion of spoken-word poetry in Fall Out Boy’s previous songs (“20 Dollar Nose Bleed”) and reinforcing the idea of a cycle (brought up on “The Phoenix”) by also serving as the song’s closing line. 

Save Rock and Roll also pulls from a range of styles, like most Fall Out Boy albums do, but the particular influences on this record point to different moments in time. “Death Valley”’s dubstep drop and the hip-hop flair of “My Songs Know…” feel current to when the album came out, while “The Phoenix” was inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It’s fitting for a song with such a strong metaphor of reinvention but also one that draws a parallel between rebirth and remixing, which is in itself a process of taking old music and turning it into something new. 

The choice of guest vocalists similarly reflects different eras of music, with each song taking cues from the artist’s own style. Elton John and Courtney Love feature on the title track and “Rat A Tat,” respectively. They’re pop and rock artists from decades past, and those two genres also happen to be Fall Out Boy’s biggest influences across their career. Big Sean guests on “The Mighty Fall,” and Foxes sings on “Just One Yesterday” — representing two of the bigger genres (hip-hop and modern pop) at the time the album came out, which reflects the shifts in popular tastes. The music videos also feature 2 Chainz (“My Songs Know…”) and Tommy Lee (“Death Valley”), again balancing out modern with veteran acts, hip-hop with rock and bridging the gap between what was popular before and what music fans were gravitating toward in 2013. 

The goal isn’t to separate these types of music but to draw parallels and ultimately connect them. “I think that in some ways the ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll is a little bit how hip-hop is looked at now,” bassist Pete Wentz said in an interview with TIME. “Hip-hop is looked at as a counterculture. That’s what we want to do: We want to play good music and use big ideas and make a grand discourse.”

With Save Rock And Roll, Fall Out Boy showed the world that they weren’t just a nostalgia band but one with relevance in 2013 and beyond. The record debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — as both following releases did as well — and has since been certified platinum.

In March, Fall Out Boy released So Much (For) Stardust, over five years after the release of their previous album, the more pop-oriented (and less beloved) MANIA — another long-awaited record, and one that similarly works in contrasts. It also refutes the idea of Fall Out boy as a nostalgia band. It’s conscious of where the band’s been, but it’s also committed to finding exciting places to go next, and going deeper into the band’s less-explored influences. “Our band has been an ongoing art project for 20 years, and we know there have been many inception points along that journey,” Wentz said about the album in a press release. “We wanted to create an album that merged those points together — something new, but carved from our foundation.”

Fans have been eagerly waiting for a new Fall Out Boy record, and this time there’s a much larger audience willing to embrace them. Pop punk experiences cycles of popularity, hitting a peak prehiatus, then receiving less attention in 2013 and having attracted a bigger following in recent years. The melding of hip-hop and pop punk, which Fall Out Boy were doing even before Save Rock and Roll, was especially forward-thinking, especially since emo-rap has taken off and influenced the current generation of pop-punk acts.

“I don’t know if we can save rock ‘n’ roll,” Stump told Yahoo. “I don’t know if that’s even the point… It needs to be saved from being a vision of the past. It needs to accept that there is a future, and it needs to relate to the future.” 

Rock ’n’ roll may not have needed saving, but it does often need redefining, and that’s what Fall Out Boy did — for the genre and themselves.