Fall Out Boy will embark on the biggest headlining tour of their career next year, with stops at several massive US baseball stadiums, and they’ve marked the announcement – coming into their 25th year as a band – with a fantastic, back-to-basics new single, “Aces”. “Keep the fire alive,” frontman Patrick Stump sings, aptly, on the new track, “through the hard times, through the slow decay and the fast decline.” “Aces” accelerates the return to the live band sound that began with 2023 So much (for) Stardustfrom the delicate introductory guitar riff played by Joe Trohman to drummer Andy Hurley’s turbulent fills and blazing bass drum work.
“It’s so cool to see the level playing field, where everyone can create in their room on a laptop,” says bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz. “But at the same time, the 10,000-plus hours that Andy Hurley spent on drums are just very, very difficult to replicate in a test tube.”
Trohman, who had surgery for nerve damage in his hand and already had to miss some tour dates, “was able to record, and everything went well with that, so he’ll be at the shows,” Wentz said.
The Twilight of the Punks tour will hit 36 cities around the world in 2027, with Offspring, Good Charlotte and Story So Far opening for the majority of the North American tour. The European and British leg will begin on May 17 at the O2 Arena in Prague; the 21-date North American broadcast begins July 13 in Arlington, Texas, and concludes August 26 in Portland, Oregon. Artist pre-sales begin Wednesday, November 11, and general on-sale begins Thursday, November 12.
The band will play Soldier Field in Chicago on July 24, in its first concert at the hometown stadium. “Will Fall Out Boy ever get to play Soldier Field again? I don’t know,” Wentz says. “I hope so, but maybe not. So maybe we should do something that will be added to Soldier Field’s Wikipedia.”
Fans shouldn’t take too much advantage of the “Twilight” title. “This is not a farewell tour,” Wentz says. “I always think at some point it’s the last thing we do, and it should be important. (But) that’s not it. That’s not what I’m saying at all. … The more we get into our family life and so on, I know it’s been longer between tours and between albums, and I just think it’s because we want to make it all seem important, and not just, ‘Oh, the three of them are touring years and come out with something disposable.'”
Will the new song lead to an album? “After Andrew Garfield, what do you do?” said Stump, referring to the actor’s fervent public denials before his surprise return as Spider-Man. “Either I’ll tell the truth, which is there’s no album out right now, and it’ll be, ‘Well, he’s lying about that.’ …I can honestly say that there is no album currently. I’m not currently working on an album.
“I think there has to be something more to complete the picture,” adds Wentz. “But I don’t know if it’s just an album. I’d love to do a Fall Out Boy musical. I just want to do something that has a slightly skewed perspective. But there’s no album right now. There’s no album that we’re going to release tomorrow – unless Patrick did it without telling anyone.”
Stump nevertheless emphasizes that his creative collaboration with Wentz continues. “People were always asking me,” he said, “Are you still writing?” And I’m like, “We’re still writing…”. There’s never a time when I’m not writing. There’s never a time when Pete and I aren’t talking and writing. It’s just that it often happens that you don’t have anything that you really need to share. And so we kind of landed on this song, and it was like, “Let’s get in the studio.” It’s really a very natural thing.
For Wentz, the song was strong enough to take him out of his domestic life. “My home life is so task-oriented,” he says. “You’re just going to the next meal or the next cleanup. So it’s a lot harder to say, ‘Hmm, what would a Fall Out Boy song sound like in 2026?’ And what would our voice sound like? And what would a performance look like?” There has to be a reason for doing it. Doing it “just because” usually doesn’t work for art.
If “Aces” is particularly reminiscent of Under the cork-era FOB, it doesn’t hurt that Stump went back to the guitar amps he used on “Sugar, I’m Going Down” (which recently landed in the Top 20 of rolling stone(list of the best rock songs of the 21st century). “I pulled out some old amplifiers that I hadn’t played since probably 2008 or something,” Stump says. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that sounds very 2006.’…I’m not a really nostalgic guy. I’m not a guy that’s really motivated by going back to the past. But there was something really strange, almost, about just playing open chords and hearing the same sound coming out of the speakers. And it was something new, because I play it too (now), and I know music theory now, instead to be when I was 19.”
Wentz considers the band’s current sound to be the result of a long evolution. “When we released (the 2013 films) Saving rock and rollwhen we released (2015) American beautythere were no bands on the radio, and pop radio was a really omnipresent force at the time,” he says. “So in a way, like when you give your kid medicine and you cover it up with sugar, a band is there, but it’s sort of hidden, or it’s embedded.” At the time of Stardust, he adds, they decided they were in a new era, “a time where whatever you put out, the weirder or more authentic it is – in an age where there’s a lot of inauthenticity – the authentic things really stand out.”
The song’s lyrical references to battling midlife decline are no coincidence. “In the past, we asked ourselves: ‘Can you imagine going on stage at 50? “, says Wentz, who turned 47 in June. “And I’m like, that’s three years from now! No one would ask that question now. It’s such a more real question. There actually has to be an answer.” Her children offered their own critique of the song. “They all have all kinds of opinions and their own take on what our band was before and what the music was like before. They were saying it sounds like a nostalgic sound, but the lyrics were very 2026. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’
Stump is still thinking about the scale of the tour, although he remembers having the same reaction when he saw details of Fall Out Boy’s first-ever headlining outing, which played venues like Chicago’s Metro. “I thought, ‘This is crazy. You don’t think we’re going to fill these spots,'” he said. “And they say, ‘No, that’s our job. Trust us.’ And that’s pretty much every tour we’ve done. As for this one: “Thinking has me kicking and screaming, because I’m like, I must be thinking there can’t be that many people. But it’s pretty exciting.”
Wentz welcomes the opportunity to go as far as possible. “I remember I was a kid, and it was this summer – it was Terminator 2it was the Guns N’ Roses-Metallica stadium tour – and it all seemed like a big, original thing that I’d never seen before,” he says. “I couldn’t go. My parents didn’t let me go. I don’t think they let me go T2and they definitely didn’t let me go to Guns N’ Roses – Metallica. But I think this is our chance. This is our chance to make the biggest version of the set, and in true Fall Out Boy fashion, throw the kitchen sink at the set. It’s time to do a production that feels like a musical, or it’s time to work inside your brain and do it in a stadium.
Stump mostly leaves it to Wentz to conceptualize. “That’s who Pete is,” he said. “It’s almost his greatest expression. It’s almost bigger for him than the words, it’s the showmanship, and I’m like, ‘This is great.’ I think there’s a funny side to that…I’m wrong and making fun of myself. The piano stuff was so funny on the last tour. So I’d like to try to create something like that, where I have the opportunity to just be who I am, because I think that really defines the intensity of Pete’s visions.
No production has yet been designed. “What always ends up happening is we try to build the whole thing, and it’s basically paper mache, and they say, ‘You can’t visit that,'” Wentz says. “And we’re trying to find a way to visit the thing.”
Wentz has ideas for some sort of immersive fan experience. “We grew up with Jim Henson, with this tangible idea, and I really believe that you have to be able to go out into the world and touch the thing and feel it,” he says. “So I want it to feel like a universe in itself – that when people come to Soldier Field, or wherever, you can step into the experience and feel like you’re inside, and that’s something you can only experience there.”
The group’s relationship status in Fall Out Boy is strong, Wentz reports, in part because the members have “allowed each other to interact as adults… We’ll be at the airport and some kid will come up to Andy and say, ‘I started playing drums because of you.’ And in my head, a part of me still…
Gn entert
