Sugar, We're Goin Down

The guitars arrive scratchy and anxious, the rhythm section locked into a gallop that never quite lets you settle. Fall Out Boy in 2005 were operating at the exact intersection of pop songwriting craft and post-hardcore energy, and this song sits at the center of that overlap — too melodic to be aggressive, too driven to be pure pop. Pete Wentz's lyrics are characteristically baroque, stuffed with metaphor and self-deprecation, and they work best as texture rather than as literal communication — you feel the emotional urgency before you parse the meaning. Patrick Stump's voice has a genuine soul influence operating under all the distortion, soulful and pleading and somehow warm even in the frantic context. The song is about yearning and failure and wanting someone in a way that's already marked by the certainty of loss, which gives its energy a poignant edge beneath the propulsive surface. It became one of the anthems of the mid-2000s alternative mainstream, heard everywhere from mall soundsystems to MySpace profiles, so embedded in a specific cultural moment that it now functions as an almost involuntary time machine. Best experienced with the volume up and some emotional unresolved business sitting in your chest, when you want sound that matches the messiness of something you haven't figured out yet.