Three years after the release of Fall Out Boy’s sixth album “American Beauty/American Psycho”, the seventh album to go on the band’s repertoire “MANIA” was released on January 19th, 2018.  The album includes 10 new highly anticipated songs, 5 of which were released as singles before the full album release date.

Like most of the former 2000’s punk rock bands, Fall Out Boy has become more modernized and is falling into the Pop genre rather than the Rock genre. The album takes a more soulful approach to music, as opposed to the band’s past styles of punk rock and punk-pop. There is also a noticeable amount of EDM influence throughout the album, but more specifically in the debut single “Young and Menace”. The single received mixed reviews following its release on April 27, 2017, as most of Fall Out Boy’s fans were hoping for a return to the band’s old style of punk rock.

My favorite song from “MANIA” is “Heaven’s Gate”. The song is beautifully sung by the band’s lead vocalist Patrick Stump. Out of all the album’s songs it is one of the most soulful. It really stretches Patrick’s vocal range as the song has many high’s and lows throughout. Although the song is very different to the band’s past style, it is still one of my favorite on the album as it is pushing towards their future genre.

All of the songs on the album are enjoyable, but my least favorite is “Young and Menace” as it is the most different from what Fall Out Boy has done in the past, and I feel that it doesn’t fit the album’s theme as well as some of the other song’s included. The song has very obvious EDM influence and has a portion in the middle of the song which reminds me more of a remix than an actual song. Although there are sections of the song I don’t like, the vocals are done extremely well and the song was beautifully written.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, leading vocalist Pete Wentz said “It feels like every once in awhile, you’ve gotta do a hard restart that clears the cache and erases the hard drive. I think that’s what [Mania] was – a big palette cleanse.” I feel this quote has a lot of truth to it, as the band has gone in a whole new direction with this album than it has in the past.