Fall Out Boy spent last year doing some serious woodshedding. We know this because in a poetic new year’s note to fans entitled “A Homeboy’s Life,” the Chicago-bred band promised that new music is coming in 2023.
“We spent the last year jamming ideas in a tiny room [and] can’t wait to share them with you,” they wrote in the new year’s day note to their email list signed by all four members, which ended with a teasing P.S. that read, “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 last week — 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…’”
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 a copy of the note below.
