You know what this is.

by Michael Jack O’Brien

Executive Editor

After listening to the new Fall Out Boy EP Mania, I have a few takeaways. First: This album is bad, and second, this album isn’t Fallout Boy. I won’t pretend that Mania is the worst thing to hit my ears this year. I won’t even pretend that the leading single in the EP“Young and Menace” isn’t extremely catchy despite being a generic EDM banger. However, this album still falls extremely short, as this Fall Out Boy album shows that pop-rock, and the alternative genre from which the band was a mainstay in the early to mid-2000s is a shell of itself. On a majority of these tracks, the “rock” roots of Fallout Boy are barely present, with the band instead choosing for a synthetic, nocturnal pop-EDM sound, with screeching bass lines and tinny, trap inspired high hats on a majority of the tracks. While the old band does pop out occasionally, like on the anthemic “HOLD ME TIGHT OR DONT”, they are few and far between By doing this, Fallout Boy has followed in the steps of many 2000s rock bands before them: from Linkin Park, to Coldplay, to Maroon 5, all of these bands have decided to abandon the sound that made them special, and “change with the times” so to speak by revamping themselves as EDM groups disguised as rock bands. It’s a disappointing change, and when onlookers say that “pop-rock is dead”, this album and many others only confirm our worst fears.