Album Review: Fall Out Boy – Greatest Hits: Believers Never Die – Volume Two

Fall Out Boy’s second greatest hits collection finds them in much fitter shape than their first. While Believers Never Die volume one (released 10 years ago, almost to the day) was filled with the emo enormo-singles that allowed the band to swap Chicago’s box clubs for MTV, its release came just days before the confused announcement of the band’s 2009 hiatus, with it later becoming apparent that all four members needed a time-out from a set-up that was beginning to turn toxic.

That extended cooling-off period was broken by the surprise release of My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light ’Em Up) in spring 2013. It was a song that unapologetically advertised a new direction, all super-modern and slick with hip-hop energy. In case anyone wasn’t getting the message, rapper 2 Chainz turned up in the video with a flamethrower to torch the band’s old records. It served as the clear gateway to Fall Out Boy 2.0, and it’s here that Believers Never Die Volume Two starts rolling – picking out the highlights of a six-year stretch that covers the albums Save Rock And Roll (2013), American Beauty/American Psycho (2015), M A N I A (2018) and beyond.

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While much was made of the distance between the quartet’s emo-rock roots and the matured pop of Save Rock And Roll, perhaps the biggest takeaway from this collection is how much Fall Out Boy have changed and progressed again since then. The tracklist plays a part in this by running chronologically, which means that after the aforementioned opener, we get the oversized, symphony-led theatrics of The Phoenix and the blissed-out beats of Alone Together, before Young Volcanoes proves that vocalist Patrick Stump can do acoustic soul better than whoever’s at the top of the charts.

But from here the shapes of the songs and the ideas coursing through them only go larger. Centuries ushers in the American Beauty/American Psycho era with its prize-fighting gait as Patrick promises that ‘You will remember me for centuries’, while Immortals – the song the band wrote for Disney’s Big Hero 6 movie in 2014 – ups the weirdness as it twists candied hooks around Asian-styled electronics. Then there’s Uma Thurman, which samples the theme tune from cult ’60s TV show The Munsters, mixes in anxious keys, and winds up being the first Fall Out Boy song you could properly dance to.

The group’s confidence to experiment reached its apex with last year’s seventh record, M A N I A, something that’s best observed here on the surging The Last Of The Real Ones – a track that reads like a romantic drama but sounds more like a Spaghetti Western. These boundaries are only stretched further with I’ve Been Waiting, the out-and-out pop jam that the band made with iLoveMakonnen earlier this year, which is elevated by a posthumous appearance from Lil Peep. Although they’d already staked their claim in it, the track truly cements Fall Out Boy’s transition into the world of mainstream music.

The two previously unreleased songs on the record – Dear Future Self (Hands Up) and Bob Dylan – tie up this era of the band nicely. The former is a brand new track that features a cameo from Wyclef Jean and speeds through manic pop loops like a nauseating fairground waltzer, while the latter – a song written during the American Beauty/American Psycho era – shows Fall Out Boy at their best: plying big emotional heft onto crooked digital melodies. Both give the impression that this is a band wildly back in love with what they’re doing, and one with plenty more gas in the tank. They serve as an appropriate sign-off on a collection that, above all, honours the band’s fearless reinvention. Here’s to Part Three.

Verdict: 4/5