Fall Out Boy’s Joe Trohman on 2018’s Electropop ‘Mania’ – ‘I Can’t Say That I Love It’

In preparation for his upcoming memoir – None of This Rocks – Fall Out Boy guitarist/keyboardist/backing vocalist Joe Trohman recently (Sept. 9) spoke with Rolling Stone about, well, a lot of interesting things. Of particular note are the revelations that he’s not entirely fond of their last studio LP, 2018’s Mania, and that he didn’t have a lot to do with it.

As Rolling Stone reports, Trohman was unhappy about having to ditch a few traditional rock songs in favor of the more synth-heavy material that made it to the album. “I’d say, ‘I’m gonna extricate myself from this. This is not what I want to do,'” he explained, adding that he “stayed pretty much out of [making] it, more or less.”

He continued:

Mania has some cool ideas and interesting stuff in there. But it didn’t work as well, and I can’t say I love it. . . . I love synthesizers, synthesizers that we play. We can play music; let’s play the music. Let’s not go for samples. Let’s not try to reach for singles. At this point, we’ve had so many hit singles. Do we really even need to reach for singles anymore?

Elaborating further on what kind of music he would want to keep creating, he stated that he’d like to “go back to making a record . . . with guitars, bass, drums, vocal.” In fact, he revealed, Fall Out Boy were “working on some stuff that was guitar-based” but it ended up on “the back burner.”

He added:

It would be nice to make a record where the guitar is a little more upfront. We did start that way, as a guitar-based rock band, and it’d be cool to go back to those roots. We’d have to find a way to do it that doesn’t sound like Fall Out Boy from 2005. It might be cool for somebody else to do that, but it wouldn’t be cool for us to do it.

What did you think of Mania, though? Would you prefer a return to the band’s former guitar-heavy glory? Let us know!