Fall Out Boy are storming into 2023 with a vengeance. The first taste of new music from the follow-up to 2018’s MANIA album was revealed in a 13-second clip featuring the Chicago-bred group’s signature urgent emo-tinged rock. “Sending my love from the other side/ The apocalypse/ And I just about snapped/ Don’t look back/ Every lover’s got a little dagger in their hand,” singer Patrick Stump rages over a rush of pop-punk energy.
In the tease posted on Wednesday afternoon (Jan. 11), the band also revealed that the song is due out on Jan. 18 and that there is “lots more to come soon.”
FOB has been teasing their eight album for months, explaining in a new year’s note to fans that they, “spent the last year jamming ideas in a tiny room [and] can’t wait to share them with you,” adding, “Thanks for always sticking around. Thanks for working the beat. Spoiler alert: we got more than a gold watch coming for you next year.”
The update was the follow-up to a nearly two-minute animated claymation video they dropped in late Dec. — A Claymation Fall Out Boy Celebration — starring a cute black dog, vomiting neon hands and a magical land of bizarre, shape-shifting creatures with what sounded like a brief snippet of new music. The video and note appear to be part of a long tease for the as-yet-untitled album, whose release date has not yet been announced.
The update for fans was also preceded by a website announcing “greetings from pink seashell beach,” with an image of a shell (inscribed with the hint “the answers are all inside of this”) that flips over when clicked to reveal a baseball on the other side and the message “the beach was never real. None of it is”; some fans also received cryptic postcards with the words “Pink Seashell Beach” on them and the message, “I saw you in a bright clear field. Hurricane heat in my head. The kind of pain you feel to get good in the end. Inscribed like stone and faded by the rain: ‘Give up what you love give up what you love before it does you in…’”
The shell game reportedly continued this week when Bring Me the Horizon singer Oli Sykes revealed in his Instagram Story that he’d received a box featuring a giant numbered seashell and a note with the single’s title on it. “wtf what is this & why is it at my house,” Sykes wrote.
Before that, fans also posted images of a full-page ad FOB took out in their hometown Chicago Tribune in late November that read “FOB 8: If you build it, they will come.” At press time no additional information was available on follow to MANIA, which featured the singles “Young and Menace,” “Champion” and “The Last of the Real Ones.”
Check out the “Love From the Other Side” preview below.
