Fall Out Boy bring their very own Eras Tour to Download 2024

This June, Taylor Swift is bringing her long-awaited Eras Tour to the UK, and it may have given Fall Out Boy some ideas. At their first Download Festival headline slot last night (June 15), the emo legends guided fans through their varied and wide-ranging discography, album by album.

It began with Patrick Stump pulling a Kurt Cobain at Reading ’92 and appearing on screens in a hospital gown. He then donned his trademark 2003-era peaked beanie to run through a pair of highlights from debut album Take This To Your Grave.

Fall Out Boy’s debut set them up as an exciting and fresh new band in the emo scene, but it was follow-up From Under The Cork Tree that sent them stratospheric. At Download, they ripped through ‘Sugar, We’re Goin Down’. ‘Dance, Dance’ and ‘A Little Less Sixteen Candles, a Little More “Touch Me”’ back-to-back, rubbishing any ideas that they don’t have the chops or the tunes to command such a stage.

From there, they tracked the continuation of their emo supremacy era on Infinity on High with ‘This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race’, ‘Thnks fr th Mmrs’ and beyond, before the giant bear that adorns the cover of 2009’s curveball record Folie à Deux‘ was brought out to accompany the band through Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes’and ‘I Don’t Care’.

By this point, just about halfway through the set, many might have been wondering why the band had used up almost all of their biggest hits already, not twigging the unique chronology of the setlist. It made for a strange second half of the show, with the energy somewhat labouring through the section for 2015’s underwhelming American Beauty / American Psycho LP, with things picking up again for the pop maximalism of M A N I A.

Frontloading the set like this was inevitable when Fall Out Boy chose such a themed setlist for the show, and while it made the second half a little uneven, it did provide a real-time tracking of their journey from heart-on-sleeve emo darlings to pop experimentalists with pyro coming out of their ears and a still-restless need to tread new ground.

Fall Out Boy played:

Take This To Your Grave
‘Chicago Is So Two Years Ago’
‘Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy’

From Under The Cork Tree
‘Sugar, We’re Goin Down’
‘Dance, Dance’
‘A Little Less Sixteen Candles, a Little More “Touch Me”’
‘Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows)’

Infinity On High
‘This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race’
‘Thriller’
‘Bang the Doldrums’
‘Thnks fr th Mmrs’

Folie à Deux
‘Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes’
‘I Don’t Care’

Save Rock and Roll
‘The Phoenix’‘My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up)’

American Beauty / American Psycho
‘Uma Thurman’
‘The Kids Aren’t Alright’
‘Immortals’

M A N I A
‘The Last of the Real Ones’

‘What a Catch, Donnie’
‘Golden’

So Much (for) Stardust
‘So Much (for) Stardust’
‘Love From the Other Side’
‘Fake Out’

‘XO’
‘Centuries’
‘Saturday’

Keep up with all the latest news and reviews from Download Festival 2024 on Rolling Stone UK here.