Fall Out Boy are continuing to tease their imminent return, delivering what seems to be a preview of a new song in a video titled ‘A Claymation Fall Out Boy Celebration’.
The two-minute short, animated by Mr. Oz (best known for his work in Marvel’s ‘Venomverse’), begins with a trio of anthropomorphic stars descending from the night sky into a random backyard, where a dog looks at them inquisitively.
One of the stars brushes a glittering powder onto the dog, before an octopus-like alien creature emerges from its kennel and snatches it, dragging it into a lair where a giant purple blob – replete with eight bulging eyes (potentially nodding to Fall Out Boy’s next album being their eighth) – swallows it whole. Inside the alien blob’s stomach, the dog is met by a cohort of glowing neon hands, who all vomit upon seeing it.
One of the hands smiles at the dog, however, leading it to a painting on the wall that shows the dog as some kind of mythical deity. The wall slides open to reveal a tropical oasis, from which a new cast of trippy alien figures emerge. One alien transforms into a door, with another shoving the dog through it. Our canine lead winds up in another backyard – now in the daytime – where a man appears to be grilling steaks.
A dropped steak catches the attention of the dog, but when the man turns around, it’s revealed that he’s covered from head to toe in murmuring faces. It’s now that we hear what’s assumed to be the opening chords of Fall Out Boy’s next single – a punchy riff and gnashing, cymbal-heavy drums (evocative of the band’s debut album, 2003’s ‘Take This To Your Grave’) that cut off right before they launch into something bigger.
Have a look at ‘A Claymation Fall Out Boy Celebration’ below:
Fall Out Boy started teasing their return just under a month ago, when they took out a full-page ad in the Chicago Tribune to plug a new logo, “FOB 8” and the mysterious phrase, “If you build it, they will come.” The hype then continued earlier this month, when fans began receiving cryptic postcards with the title ‘Pink Seashell Beach’.
Those postcards came with a message reading: “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…’”
They arrived alongside the launch of a website dubbed “sending my love from pink seashell beach”, which is also promoted with the new claymation video. Upon entering the site, visitors are met with the visual of pink seashell etched with the phrase, “The answers are inside of this.”
Clicking the shell leads to it flipping over, revealing a dirty baseball where a pearl might sit. The scene then melts to a black screen with the new FOB logo and a card reading: “The beach was never real. None of it is.”
Another website, dubbed “sending my love from the other side”, asks fans to “RSVP to the other side”. Clicking a prompt, inquisitive visitors will be met with a form to send off their name, email and physical address. A header on the site reads, “Welcome to the other side of the apocalypse,” and clicking on the “O” in “other” will lead to the new FOB logo (donning a Santa hat) overtaking the splash page.
Fall Out Boy’s last album was 2018’s ‘MANIA’, which NME’s Hannah Mylrea described in her three-star review as “worlds away from the smart pop-punk of [‘Take This To Your Grave’] or the rousing emo of 2005’s ‘From Under The Cork Tree’”.
Meanwhile, guitarist Joe Trohman revealed back in September that Fall Out Boy had been working on some new “guitar-based” material, which had apparently been put on the backburner. “I don’t know know what’s happening with it,” he told Rolling Stone. “I think it unfortunately went to the back burner. It would be nice to make a record where the guitar is a little more upfront.
“We did start that way, as a guitar-based rock band, and it’d be cool to go back to those roots. We’d have to find a way to do it that doesn’t sound like Fall Out Boy from 2005. It might be cool for somebody else to do that, but it wouldn’t be cool for us to do it.”
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