Fall Out Boy was formed in 2001 in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois by friends Pete Wentz and Joe Trohman. Wentz was a “visible fixture” of the relatively small Chicago hardcore punk scene of the late 1990s, performing in various groups such as Birthright, Extinction and First Born, as well the metalcore band Arma Angelus and the more political Racetraitor, “a band that managed to land the covers of Maximumrocknroll and Heartattack fanzines before releasing a single note of music”. Wentz was growing dissatisfied with the changing mores of the community, which he viewed as a transition from political activism to an emphasis on moshing and breakdowns. With enthusiasm in Arma Angelus waning, he created a pop punk side project with Trohman as an “easy and escapist” project. Trohman met Patrick Stump, then a drummer for grindcore band Xgrinding processX and a host of other bands that “never really managed”, at a Borders bookstore in Wilmette. While discussing Neurosis with a friend, Stump interrupted the conversation to correct their classification of the band in a conversation that soon shifted to the new band. Stump, viewing it as an opportunity to try out with “local hardcore celebrity” Wentz, directed Trohman to his MP3.com page, which contained sung-through acoustic recordings. Stump intended to try out as a drummer, but Trohman urged him to bring out his acoustic guitar; he impressed the duo with songs from Saves the Day’s Through Being Cool. While Wentz wanted Racetraitor bandmate Andy Hurley in the group as drummer, Hurley appeared uninterested and too busy.

The band’s debut album, Take This to Your Grave, was issued by Fueled by Ramen in May 2003. Previously, one of the band’s earliest recordings, Evening Out with Your Girlfriend, had not seen release until shortly before Grave in March 2003, when the band had gained considerable momentum. “Our record was something being rushed out to help generate some interest, but that interest was building before we could even get the record out”, said Sean Muttaqi. The band actively tried to stop Uprising from releasing the recordings (as the band’s relationship with Muttaqi had grown sour), as the band viewed it as a “giant piece of garbage” recorded before Hurley’s involvement that the band members ceased to consider the debut album of the group. Gradually, the band’s fanbase grew in size as the label pushed for the album’s mainstream success. According to Wentz, shows began to end in a near-riot and the group were banned from several venues because the entire crowd would end up onstage. The band gained positive reviews for subsequent gigs at South by Southwest (SXSW) and various tour appearances. The band joined the Warped Tour for five dates in the summer of 2004, and on one date the band had only performed three songs when the stage collapsed due to the large crowd. The band appeared on the cover of the August 2004 edition of Alternative Press, and listening stations at Hot Topic partially helped the album move 2,000-3,000 copies per week by Christmas 2004, at which point the label considered the band “tipping” into mainstream success.

Fall Out Boy have been instrumental in the careers of other artists, such as Panic! at the Disco, whom Pete Wentz signed to his record label, Decaydance Records, in late 2004. Several artists, such as You Me at Six and Taylor Swift, have created or performed covers of Fall Out Boy songs as a homage to the band.

The Fall Out Boy band members were the first inductees to the “Hall of Wood” at the 2015 MtvU Woodie Awards and performed a medley of five songs at the ceremony. This honor is given to artists who have used MTV Woodie Awards as a “launching pad” in achieving chart topping success within their musical careers, thus influencing up and coming bands. The award also recognizes bands “sticking to their roots” and “maintaining their loyal fan base”. The group had won the Woodie Award for Streaming for “Grand Theft Autumn” at the first ceremony in 2004.

The band suffered a setback, however, when Wentz had an emotional breakdown in February 2005, culminating in a suicide attempt. He had withdrawn from the rest of the group, with his condition only apparent through his lyrics, and had also become obsessed with the recent Indian tsunami and his own self-doubt. “It is particularly overwhelming when you are on the cusp of doing something very big and thinking that it will be a big flop”, he said later. Wentz swallowed a handful of Ativan anxiety pills (he described the act as “hypermedicating”) in the Chicago Best Buy parking lot. After being rushed to the hospital and having his stomach pumped, Wentz moved back home to Wilmette to live with his parents.

From Under the Cork Tree debuted and peaked at number nine on the Billboard 200 upon its May 2005 release. It was spearheaded by the band’s breakthrough single, “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down”, reached number eight in the US Billboard Hot 100 in September 2005, and in the UK chart in February 2006, crossing over from Alternative to Pop radio. “Dance, Dance”, the album’s second single, also was a top ten hit in the United States and was certified 3x Platinum in 2014. The record’s success led to stardom among teenagers in North America, and the band’s first arena tour had the group playing to 10,000 people per night. Rolling Stone wrote that the band’s “anthems”, distributed and marketed through their MySpace, connected with “skinny-jeans-wearing teen girls”. In support of From Under the Cork Tree, the band toured exhaustively with international tours, TRL visits, late-night television appearances and music award shows. The band performed at music festivals in 2005 and 2006, including the third Nintendo Fusion Tour in the fall of 2005, joining The Starting Line, Motion City Soundtrack, Boys Night Out, and Panic! at the Disco on a 31 city tour. The album earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and has sold over 2.7 million copies in the United States, becoming the group’s best-selling album. “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” also won the band an MTV Music Video Award.

While widely considered to be a pop punk band, Fall Out Boy has also been described as pop rock, pop, alternative rock, emo, emo pop, power pop, punk rock, and electropop, with elements of electronic, R&B, soul, funk, blue-eyed soul, hip hop, and hardcore punk, The band cites emo group The Get Up Kids as an influence among many other bands. When interviewed for a retrospective article in Alternative Press at the time The Get Up Kids disbanded in 2005, Pete Wentz stated that “Fall Out Boy would not be a band if it were not for The Get Up Kids.” Early in the band’s career, when Jared Logan was producing the group’s debut album, he asked bassist Pete Wentz what sound the band desired for recording. Wentz responded by “handing over the first two New Found Glory records”. Wentz also cites Green Day, Misfits, the Ramones, Screeching Weasel, Metallica, Earth Crisis, Gorilla Biscuits and Lifetime as influences. The band acknowledges its hardcore punk roots as an influence; all four members were involved in the Chicago hardcore scene before joining Fall Out Boy. Wentz described the band’s affiliation with the genre by saying “I think the interesting thing is that we are all hardcore kids that are writing pop music…It gives us a different style because at our core we are always hardcore. That aspect is always going to be evident in the music. We are hardcore kids that couldn’t quite cut it as hardcore kids.” He referred to Fall Out Boy’s genre as “softcore”: hardcore punk mixed with pop sensibility. Lead singer Patrick Stump, however, is also influenced by artists he listened to while growing up including Prince, Michael Jackson, and David Bowie.

In the wake of the band’s multiplatinum success, the “especially extroverted” Wentz became the most publicly visible member of the band. He confided to the press his suicide attempt and nude photos of the bassist appeared on the Internet in 2006. He gained additional exposure through his clothing line, his Decaydance record label (an imprint of Fueled by Ramen), and eventually a celebrity relationship with pop singer Ashlee Simpson, which made the two tabloid fixtures in the United States. Due to its increased success from the group’s MTV Video Music Award, the group headlined the Black Clouds and Underdogs Tour, a pop punk event that featured The All-American Rejects, Well-Known Secret, Hawthorne Heights, and From First to Last. The tour also featured The Hush Sound for half of the tour and October Fall for half. The band played to 53 dates in the U.S., Canada, and the UK.

After taking a two-month-long break following the band’s Black Clouds and Underdogs tour in promotion of the band’s 2005 album From Under the Cork Tree, Fall Out Boy returned to the studio to begin work on a follow-up effort. The band began writing songs for the new album while touring, and intended to quickly make a new album in order to keep momentum in the wake of its breakthrough success. In early 2007, the group released its third studio album, Infinity on High, which was the band’s second release on major label Island. The album marked a departure in Fall Out Boy’s sound in which the band implemented a diverse array of musical styles including funk, R&B, and flamenco. As reported by Billboard, Fall Out Boy “drifts further from its hardcore punk roots to write increasingly accessible pop tunes”, a slight departure from the group’s previous more pop punk sound predominant on their 2003 effort, Take This to Your Grave.

Infinity’s first week was a major success and was the band’s biggest selling week, selling 260,000 copies to debut at No. 1 on the US Billboard 200 and inside the top five worldwide. This charting was first started with lead single “The Carpal Tunnel of Love”, with minor success on the Billboard charts. This success was bolstered by the further-successful second single “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race”, which reached No. 2 in both the US and UK as well as the top five in many other countries. On the band’s decision to pick the song as a single, Wentz commented “There may be other songs on the record that would be bigger radio hits, but this one had the right message.” “Thnks fr th Mmrs”, the third single, peaked just outside the top 10 at No. 11 on the strength of sales and popular radio play, and went on to sell over two million copies in the US. It found its greatest success in Australia where it charted at No. 3. In 2007, Fall Out Boy placed at No. 9 in the Top Selling Digital Artists chart with 4,423,000 digital tracks sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The album itself has sold over two million copies worldwide and subsequently was certified Platinum in the United States.

As the release of the new album approached, the band and its management found that they would have to navigate changes in the music industry, facing declining record sales, the lack of a proper outlet for exhibition of music videos, and the burgeoning US economic crisis. To promote the album, Wentz launched a viral campaign in August 2008, inspired by George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and the autocratic, overbearing Big Brother organization. Folie à Deux, released in December 2008, did not perform as well commercially as its predecessor, Infinity on High. It debuted at number eight on the US Billboard 200 chart with first week sales of 150,000 copies during a highly competitive week with other big debuts, becoming Fall Out Boy’s third consecutive top ten album. This is in contrast to the band’s more successful previous effort which shifted 260,000 copies in its opening week to debut at number one the chart. Folie spent two weeks within the top 20 out of its 22 chart weeks. It also entered Billboard’s Rock Albums and Alternative Albums charts at number three. Within two months of its release, Folie à Deux was certified Gold in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), denoting shipments of 500,000 copies. The lead single, “I Don’t Care”, reached a peak at number twenty-one on the Billboard Hot 100, and was certified Platinum by the RIAA for shipments of one million copies.

Rumors and misquotes led to confusion as to what such a break truly meant; Wentz preferred to not refer to the break as a “hiatus”, instead explaining that the band was just “decompressing”. Fall Out Boy played its last show at Madison Square Garden on October 4, 2009. Near the end, Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus shaved Wentz’s head in a move Andy Greene in Rolling Stone would later describe as a “symbolic cleansing of the past, but also the beginning of a very dark chapter for the band”.

Wentz formed electronic duo Black Cards with vocalist Bebe Rexha in July 2010. The project released one single before album delays led to Rexha’s departure in 2011. Black Cards added Spencer Peterson to complete the Use Your Disillusion EP in 2012. Wentz also completed writing a novel, Gray, that he had been working on for six years outside the band, and began hosting the reality tattoo competition show Best Ink. Hurley ventured farther into rock during the hiatus, drumming with multiple bands over the three-year period. He continued to manage his record label, Fuck City, and drummed for bands Burning Empires and Enabler. He also formed heavy metal outfit The Damned Things with Trohman, Scott Ian and Rob Caggiano of Anthrax, and Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die. Despite this, the members all remained cordial to one another; Wentz was Stump’s best man at his wedding. The hiatus was, all things considered, beneficial for the group and its members, according to Hurley. “The hiatus helped them all kind of figure themselves out”, he explained in 2013. “Especially Joe and Patrick, who were so young. And Pete is a million times better.”

During the hiatus, the band members each pursued individual musical interests, which were met with “varying degrees of failure”. Stump was the only member of the quartet to take on a solo project while Fall Out Boy was on hiatus, recording debut album Soul Punk entirely on his own: he wrote, produced, and played every instrument for all tracks on the record. In addition, he married his longtime girlfriend and lost over sixty pounds through portion control and exercise. Stump blew through most of his savings putting together a large band to tour behind Soul Punk, but ticket sales were sparse and the album stalled commercially. During a particularly dark moment in February 2012, Stump poured his heart out in a 1500-word blog entry called “We Liked You Better Fat: Confessions of a Pariah”. In the post, Stump lamented the harsh reception of the record and his status as a “has-been” at 27. Stump revealed that fans harassed him on his solo tour, hurling insults such as “We liked you better fat”, and noted that “Whatever notoriety Fall Out Boy used to have prevents me from having the ability to start over from the bottom again.” Aside from Soul Punk and personal developments, Stump moonlighted as a professional songwriter/producer, co-writing tracks with Bruno Mars and All Time Low, and pursued acting.

Stump and Wentz met up for the first time in several years in early 2012 for a writing session. Wentz reached out to Stump after he penned his letter, as he too felt he was in a dark place and needed a creative outlet. He was at first reluctant to approach Stump, likening the phone call to reconnecting with a lover after years of acrimony. “I know what you need – you need your band”, Wentz told Stump. “I think it’s kind of weird that we haven’t really seen each other this year. We paid for each other’s houses and you don’t know my kid”, Wentz remarked. The result, “three or four” new songs, were shelved with near immediacy, with the two concluding that “it just wasn’t right and didn’t feel right.” Several months later, the two reconvened and wrote tracks that they felt truly represented the band in a modern form. The band decided that if a comeback was in order, it must represent the band in its current form: “We didn’t want to come back just to bask in the glory days and, like, and collect a few checks and pretend … and do our best 2003 impersonation”, said Stump. Afterwards, the quartet held an all-day secret meeting at their manager’s home in New York City where they discussed ideas and the mechanics of getting together to record. Trohman was the last to be contacted, through a three-hour phone call from Stump. As Trohman was arguably the most excited to begin other projects, he had a list of stipulations for rejoining the band. “If I’m not coming back to this band writing music […] then I don’t want to”, he remarked. Stump supported Trohman’s ambition saying Trohman “needed to be writing more”.

The band members’ main goal was to reinvent the group’s sound from scratch, creating what Trohman called a “reimagining of the band”, which focuses more on pop. Sessions were not without difficulties, as the band struggled initially to produce new material. Walker had doubts about the band’s volatility, feeling the record would not get made following “meltdown after meltdown”. The entire album was recorded in secrecy from the music industry, critics, and fans of the band. While specifically denying that the group’s announcement was a reunion because “[the group had] never broke[n] up”, the band announced a reunion tour and details of Save Rock and Roll on February 4, 2013. The quartet’s announcement included a photo of the group that had been taken earlier that morning of the band members huddled around a bonfire tossing copies of their back catalog into flames at the original location of Comiskey Park, the location of 1979’s Disco Demolition Night, a baseball promotional event which involved destroying disco records. A message on the group’s website read “when we were kids the only thing that got us through most days was music. It’s why we started Fall Out Boy in the first place. This isn’t a reunion because we never broke up. We needed to plug back in and make some music that matters to us. The future of Fall Out Boy starts now. Save rock and roll…” Save Rock and Roll debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, with first week sales of 154,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The arrival of Save Rock and Roll posted the quartet’s third-biggest sales week, and earned the group’s second career number one on the chart. The band’s chart success was best described as unexpected by music journalists. Andy Greene in Rolling Stone called the band’s comeback a “rather stunning renaissance”, and Entertainment Weekly called the number one a “major accomplishment for a band whom many in the industry had dismissed as kings of a genre whose time had passed”.

The record’s lead single, “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up)”, peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, marking the band’s first top twenty single since the group’s 2008 cover of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. It was certified 3x Platinum in the US for over 3 million sales. Inspired in part by Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, the band released a music video for every song on the album in a series titled The Young Blood Chronicles between February 2013 and May 2014. The band also released a hardcore punk-influenced EP, PAX AM Days, in late 2013. Fall Out Boy covered Elton John’s (who was featured on the Save Rock And Roll title track) song “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” for inclusion in the fortieth anniversary re-release edition of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on March 25, 2014, alongside covers by different artists.

On June 2, 2014, Wentz stated that he and Stump were writing new music: “We’re writing. I was just listening to something Patrick had written in the trailer. So we’re writing, finishing out the album cycle in South Africa in September.” In a later interview with Rock Sound regarding the status of the album, Wentz commented “We don’t have an exact timetable yet. I have a two-week-old son and Patrick has a baby on the way in October, so there’s a lot going on.” as well as stating a rough release time as early 2015. In December 2014 the band played radio-sponsored Christmas shows, including KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas.

“Centuries” – the first single of Fall Out Boy’s sixth studio album – premiered on September 8, 2014 on BBC Radio 1, receiving a worldwide release the next day. By the 2010s, there were few rock bands achieving success on mainstream radio and the charts, but “Centuries” peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 13 on Billboard Mainstream Top 40. Fall Out Boy also was featured on the track “Back to Earth” from Steve Aoki’s second album Neon Future I, which was released on September 30, 2014. Another song titled “Immortals” was released October 14, 2014, as part of the soundtrack for the Walt Disney film Big Hero 6. The group remade the Chicago Bulls’s anthem “Only the Bulls” with guest Lupe Fiasco. The recording of the song was released in November 2014.

On November 24, 2014, the title of Fall Out Boy’s sixth studio album was announced as American Beauty/American Psycho; the album was released on January 20, 2015. The album’s title track premiered on BBC Radio 1 in the UK along with the album’s title reveal. American Beauty/American Psycho debuted at No. 1 on the US Billboard 200 with 192,000 first week sales and 218,000 equivalent album units, becoming Fall Out Boy’s third No. 1 album. The band played two small venue release shows in January 2015, in London and Chicago. American Beauty/American Psycho was certified platinum in the US on March 1, 2016, after selling 1 millions units. From February through March, the band played at the Australian Soundwave festival for the first time, with two additional side shows in Sydney and Brisbane.

Fall Out Boy inducted Green Day into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 18, 2015. On May 18, the group performed its song “Uma Thurman” with Wiz Khalifa on the 2015 Billboard Music Awards. In June–August 2015, Fall Out Boy toured across the United States with Wiz Khalifa, Hoodie Allen, and MAX on the “Boys of Zummer Tour”.

On October 1, 2015, the “American Beauty/American Psycho” European tour kicked off in Dublin, Ireland, and consisted of 12 dates with shows in the UK, Russia, and Europe. On May 24, 2015 it was announced English rapper Professor Green would support Fall Out Boy on the 8-date leg of the band’s UK tour. New York based dance-duo Matt and Kim were added as additional support for the UK tour. On October 23, 2015, Fall Out Boy announced via Twitter the release of a re-worked version of its sixth studio album, Make America Psycho Again. The remix album features a remade version of each track from the original record, each featuring a different rapper. The album was released on October 30, 2015. It included the version of “Uma Thurman” featuring Wiz Khalifa which had been originally performed at the Billboard Music Awards. On March 1, 2016, it was announced Fall Out Boy were to headline Reading and Leeds Festivals in the UK in August 2016 along with Biffy Clyro.

On April 27, 2017, Fall Out Boy announced that their new album was set to be released on September 15, titled Mania, stylized as M A N I A. The first single, “Young and Menace”, was released the same day. The second single, “Champion”, was released in the U.S. on June 22 and worldwide on June 23. Music videos have been posted to Vevo and YouTube for both songs. The band plans to begin the Mania Tour in North America in October 2017 with hip hop artist blackbear and actor-rapper Jaden Smith, and will perform in Australia in 2018 with indie band WAAX. On August 3, 2017, Patrick Stump tweeted that the album’s release would be pushed back to January 19, 2018, because the band were not satisfied with the results of their work at the time.

“The Last of the Real Ones”, released on September 14, 2017 in North America and worldwide the following day, was the third single from Mania to be released, and was played on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on September 18, 2017, after being debuted at House of Blues in Chicago on September 16. The band announced the album’s completion on November 6, 2017, along with the final track list. “Hold Me Tight or Don’t” was then released as the fourth single on November 15, with the music video being released alongside. Mania was officially released January 19, 2018 and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making it the band’s third consecutive and fourth chart-topping debut overall.

In 2017, Fall Out Boy were announced as the first winners of Rock Sound’s Hall of Fame Award as part of the Rock Sound Awards. In an interview accompanying the band’s win, Patrick Stump stated one reason for the band’s success is Sugar, We’re Goin Down, explaining that the “song changed my life, I have a music career in a large part due to that song”. In 2009, Phoenix New Times writer Martin Cizmar had described Sugar, We’re Goin Down as possibly “the most listened-to emo track of all time”.

On February 23, 2018, the band released an EP called Llamania. The EP contains three unfinished demo recordings. On August 23, 2018, the band released an EP called Lake Effect Kid. The EP includes a new version of a demo, with the same name, from the band’s 2008 mixtape, CitizensFOB Mixtape: Welcome to the New Administration. In September 2018, Fall Out Boy headlined Wrigley Field in the band’s hometown of Chicago, marking a milestone in their career as their first headline show at a stadium. On December 7, 2018 Fall Out Boy received their second Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album for MANIA.

In a list of the 50 greatest pop-punk albums of all time, Rolling Stone placed Fall Out Boy’s 2003 album Take This To Your Grave as the fifth greatest, citing it as “[ushering] in a whole new, genre-blurring scene, in which heavy riffs and a screamo aesthetic mingled with old-fashioned teen heartbreak”. In a similar list, Kerrang! magazine placed Take This To Your Grave at number 11 out of 51, describing it as a “blueprint for both break-up records and timeless pop-punk”. In 2018, Rock Sound put Take This To Your Grave at number 18 in their list of the 100 best pop-punk albums, describing it as “poetic and utterly brilliant”, while 2005’s From Under The Cork Tree was placed at number 3 behind only Green Day’s Dookie and Blink-182’s Enema of the State. Rock Sound described From Under the Cork Tree as “intelligent, intriguing and utterly intoxicating…They will still be talking about this one in 50 years time.”

In 2019, the band was sued by Furry Puppet Studio for over using llama puppets made by the company. According to the company, the llamas were only licensed for use in the “Young and Menace” video but were used at live shows, on merchandise, during TV appearances, and in multiple music videos. On September 10, 2019, the band announced the Hella Mega Tour with Green Day and Weezer as headliners along themselves, with The Interrupters as an opening act. They also released “Dear Future Self (Hands Up)” off their second compilation album, Greatest Hits: Believers Never Die – Volume Two, released in November 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the summer leg of the tour has been rescheduled to 2021.

As of 2020, the band are two-time Grammy Award nominees, their first nomination having been for Best New Artist at the 2006 Grammy Awards and their second for Best Rock Album for their 2018 album MANIA at the 2019 Grammy Awards.

On July 30, 2020, the band were nominated for “Best Rock Video” at the 2020 MTV Video Music Awards, which makes them the most nominated band in history for the category.