fall out boy take this to your grave
[Courtesy of Fueled by Ramen]

Take This to Your Grave at 20: How Fall Out Boy turned their hardcore roots into pop-punk hits

It’s difficult to explain to younger generations the monumental impact that Fall Out Boy has had on pop culture. At the height of the band’s superstardom, they were being hounded by paparazzi, recording in the studio with Jay-Z, and filming music videos with Kim Kardashian. Fall Out Boy didn’t just quietly introduce the pop-punk and emo scenes into the mainstream — they went full throttle. 

For the last two decades, they’ve been shaping (and reshaping) the fabric of the alternative music scene with every record they put out. But one of the most crucial in the band’s own tapestry is their official debut, Take This to Your Grave, which celebrates its 20th anniversary on May 6th. 

Read more: Every Fall Out Boy album ranked: From worst to best

Sharp, dizzying, and defiantly juvenile, Take This to Your Grave seems to grow more endearing as time goes on. Uninhibited by the constraints that fame would soon surround them with, the Chicago quartet’s first album and the process of creating it layed out a narrative that would shape every second of the career that followed. 

As many fans will remember, Fall Out Boy was formed because Pete Wentz was looking for an escape from the shifting culture in the Chicago hardcore scene that he’d been a part of for years. He and his friend, guitarist Joe Trohman, were both searching for a sense of levity that their other bands (like the metalcore group Arma Angelus) didn’t provide, so they began assembling a new project of their own. It started to come together, thanks to a chance encounter at a Borders bookstore when Trohman was discussing music with a friend and a nearby eavesdropper — Patrick Stump — felt compelled to interrupt the conversation and correct him. After bickering about Neurosis, Trohman mentioned the band he and Wentz were working on, encouraged him to audition (eventually as a singer instead of a drummer), and the rest is history.

Wentz, who had been viewing this unnamed band as a side-project, recognized the moment for what it was. “When Patrick sang for the first time, I knew this was very special,” he said in an interview with Zane Lowe this past March. 

While the group took more solid shape with Stump’s involvement and Wentz and Trohman’s drive to make things work, everyone knew exactly what was missing: drummer Andy Hurley. Hurley was no stranger to the early members of FOB (having been in bands like Racetraitor with Wentz), although he was originally uninterested in joining and at first only occasionally filled in on drums. But it was those moments in the studio with him where the spark felt bigger than ever. So while they recorded demos and EPs without Hurley, no one felt the band click until he agreed to come on full time. That’s partially why 2002’s mini-LP Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out with Your Girlfriend, which technically holds a claim to being the band’s debut, isn’t acknowledged as such. That honor is reserved for the first record released with the full quartet: Take This to Your Grave

Take This to Your Grave is Fall Out Boy figuring it all out; how to write lyrics and melodies, how to hone in on a version of pop-punk that didn’t quite exist yet, and how to grow up. Half of the band were still teenagers when the album was recorded. Wentz, the oldest member of the group, was in his early 20s. The sound and lyrics captured in the 40-minute runtime reflect the pettiness and ambition of four young people bursting at the seams, ready to change the world. It’s a sentiment wrapped up nicely in “Saturday:” “With promise and precision/And mess of youthful innocence.”

The record showcases the group pulling elements from their experiences in hardcore and using them to craft something completely new. Blending hardcore staples like unclean vocals from Wentz, heart-stopping drumming from Hurley, and energetic guitar riffs from Trohman, along with danceable pop melodies, they were appealing to both the scene they came out of and those outside of it. Their innovative sound, coupled with Stump’s unique vocals and Wentz’s powerful songwriting, is what set Fall Out Boy on their own path. 

To this day, Stump manages to sing his contemporaries under the table with a voice that can fill arenas with ease. Even 20 years ago, Stump exhibited a vocal power that was rare to find, particularly in pop-punk. It was always there, but along with it was the fear that he would be shamed by the rest of the scene. “I was really scared,” he told Zane Lowe earlier this year. “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 group of people who were becoming discontent with their former scene, Take This to Your Grave became a safe place to experiment and twist the genre around. 

Stump credits much of that feeling of security to co-songwriter Pete Wentz. One of the most thrilling aspects of Take This to Your Grave is hearing the pair’s creative partnership as it began. Their ability to write together has been compared to the stuff of legend, like the partnership between Elton John (who would later collaborate with them) and Bernie Taupin. The dynamic isn’t quite as fleshed out as it is on later records, but it’s exactly what TTTYG needs it to be. Wentz’s lyrics are melodramatic, clever, and come at you with breakneck speed. “Stop burning bridges and drive off of them,” he snaps in the album’s opening track. No one could deliver Wentz’s words the way he does — his voice erupting at exactly the right moment. There’s an excitement and curiosity mixed with wariness hanging in the air between these two new friends who are about to go on an incomprehensible journey together. 

20 years later, that journey is still ongoing. While the band recently released their eighth studio album, it seems now more 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 said after being asked to rank every FOB album in an interview with Kerrang!. On Jan. 25th, 2023 the band played a surprise show at The Metro in Chicago in honor of their new album — the same place they played their album release show 20 years prior. That night they played songs from their debut that they hadn’t played in over a decade, and when Wentz hoisted himself into the crowd to scream the end of “Saturday,” face wide with joy, one would think he was in his early 20s again.

There’s no arguing at this point that Take This to Your Grave not only set Fall Out Boy on a path to massive success, but helped configure the future of pop-punk in a way that plenty have tried to replicate and few have managed to achieve. When the band speaks about the legacy of their first record, it’s with a blend 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 said 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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