Roughly five years sit between Fall Out Boy’s 2018 album, M A N I A, and their most recent album, So Much (For) Stardust. You don’t need me to tell you that a lot has happened in between Fall Out Boy’s latest single, “Hold Me Like a Grudge,” and 2018. TikTok has encouraged the Western music industry to focus even harder on catchiness and to place a greater emphasis on the relatability of artists’ lyrics. Thanks to the runaway successes of genre-bending artists like rapstress/punk-chick Doja Cat and Gen Z’s riot grrl singer-songwriters Olivia Rodrigo and GAYLE, there has been a noticeable move towards rock music conventions in the pop music scene.
Loyal fans of Fall Out Boy’s rough-edged, skate punk DNA have been raving about So Much (For) Stardust. Comparisons to 2005’s From Under the Cork Tree and 2008’s Folie à Deux have abounded on Twitter and YouTube. I look forward to the minute I have forty-four minutes to listen to the album in full but until then – this is Fall Out Boy’s “Hold Me Like a Grudge.” As a song, So Much (For) Stardust’s third single is the Pop fraternal twin to the album’s first single’s, “Love From The Other Side,” Rock twin. On the former Andy Hurley’s drumming retains the same staccato and tinny style that is bombastic on the latter, just with less foregrounding in the audio mix of the third single. Patrick Stump’s soaring and somersaulting vocal style is confined to a less expansive and dramatic note-range than its adrenaline-spiking apotheosis on Stardust’s first single, but “Hold Me Like a Grudge” is formatted for radio-play where “Love From The Other Side” is unequivocally a cultural product made to be the opening of a concept album, so Stump’s restraint is sensible. Stump’s crisp and cool, yet saturated and robust riffs play off of the steady tapping of Hurley’s drums to solidify the rhythm of Stardust’s third single as a tactfully-gnawing earworm.
Fall Out Boy are no strangers to cunning linguistic-moves (“Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends” and “Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song so We Wouldn’t Get Sued” from 2005’s From Under the Cork Tree are critical contributions to the constitution of classic Emo music), so obviously the single’s lyrics are cool. The pre-chorus’, “I’m just a cherub, riding comets through the night sky / Screaming at the stars like night lights… / Running middle fingers through the red lights / And I guess I’m getting older, ‘cause I’m less pissed / When I can’t get onto the guest list,” and the choruses’, “Fever dream, tangerine sweat… / Silent killers are these years, coming like waves / You put the ‘fun,’ into dysfunction,” are the song’s lyrical knock-outs in my personal opinion.
While collapsing an artist with two decades’ worth of music, eight diegetically-unique albums and such a number of production-phases that bringing up how many times the band has broken up and gotten back together is one of the Emo scene’s most cited in-jokes, is arguably an indiscriminate judgement call, I would describe “Hold Me Like a Grudge” as quintessentially Fall Out Boy. The band tour across the United States, with a few stops in Canada, throughout the summer months, and then embark on a European expedition in the fall – psst…You should go (and tell them that Caitlin sent you)!
You can listen to “Hold Me Like A Grudge” here:
