Saturday

There's something almost skeletal about this one — a minor-key guitar figure that circles without quite resolving, building an atmosphere of weekend melancholy rather than weekend excitement. The production is murkier than Fall Out Boy's more polished work, sitting in a space that feels like the underside of a night out: the part nobody photographs. Stump's vocal here is more restrained, almost conversational, delivering lines with a weariness that suggests the narrator knows exactly how this night will end before it's started. The song captures that peculiarly teenage and post-teenage experience of being somewhere you thought you wanted to be and feeling entirely elsewhere. Drums crash in and out without the triumphant release they seem to promise. There's a kind of romantic self-destruction embedded in the DNA here — the narrator isn't passive, exactly, but he's not doing anything to change the trajectory either. It belongs to the From Under the Cork Tree era, when the band was finding the balance between confessional and anthemic and sometimes landed in this third thing — something longing and unresolved. Put it on in the car late at night when the city is quieter than it should be and you're not ready to go home yet.