Fall Out Boy on new pre-armageddon album: “It feels like the whole world’s about to blow”
Last week, Fall Out Boy released their eighth studio album, So Much (for) Stardust. The release marked the band’s full-LP return following 2018’s Mania, an album the group considered a deviation from their tried and tested path. Now, in a new interview with Mark Beaumont of The Independent, Fall Out Boy has discussed the new release.
Although 2018’s Mania topped the charts, its synth-pop tendencies alienated a host of devoted fans upon its release. “At times, that record is our most impenetrable and experimental, in addition to it being probably our most pop at certain points,” frontman Patrick Stump said of the album.
“There’s a reason when you’re at the mall, and you’re smelling perfumes, they give you coffee grinds in between because you need to reset,” said bassist Pete Wentz. “That’s what that is to me. It’s coffee grinds. It needed to happen; there needed to be a release of some kind.”
When working on the new album, So Much (for) Stardust, the band realised their responsibility to return to their more rock-orientated style. “I feel like this record is stripping away any of that, it’s very low-tech as a record.”
Later, Beaumont introduced the topic of AI as a potential reason to return to more manual means of music creation – after all, the band didn’t want to feel redundant. Stump recalled how a family member once showed him a FOB track created using ChatGPT.
“They prompted it to write a Fall Out Boy song and then showed me the lyrics going, ‘Wow, look at this!’ I’m going, ‘Those are the worst lyrics I’ve ever read.’ I think it’s very much in the realm of possibility that AI starts writing songs, that the songs start being good, whatever. The thing I wonder, in that Dr Malcolm [from Jurassic Park] way – ‘You ask what you could do, you never ask if you should’ – is why? Art is about expression so if you’re consuming art that has no expression behind it, what’s the point?”
Addressing the “post-pandemic, pre-Armageddon” creativity of So Much (for) Stardust, Wentz said: “It feels like the whole world’s about to blow all the time. You’re watching people freak out, people wanna dictate their opinion to each other but they’re really in an echo chamber just dictating it back to themselves. Any time they interact with somebody who has a different opinion, they’re freaking out at each other and one of them’s filming the other one. It just feels like everyone’s on edge all the time…it feels like we’re on a precipice.”
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