In the wake of My Bloody Valentine and David Bowie stealth-bombing pop culture, decades after their last recordings, it's no wonder hardly anybody in the UK noticed Fall Out Boy rush-release a secretly recorded fifth album in April after a trifling five years away – we had barely filed our report to the Missing Emos Bureau. They save the impact of their comeback for the stage, though. Storming the Academy in balaclavas and black combat jackets, they're a changed band. Patrick Stump, once a chubby oddity who must have become the singer via some catastrophic paperwork mix-up with heartthrob bassist Pete Wentz, has shrunk to a svelte dandy. Band lothario Wentz, notorious for texting genital selfies to fans, seems reformed by fatherhood and a failed marriage to Ashlee Simpson, dedicating a speech about how "your flaws will lead you to make great art" to his son Bronx – although he still requests enough light to hunt out old conquests before their rendition of I Slept With Someone in Fall Out Boy and All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me.
Yes, anthemic sitcom pop-metal songs with ridiculous titles are once again the order of service for this pre-arena-tour club show, heavy on the chant-along hooks of their mid-noughties peak – Sugar, We're Goin Down, the quasi-Arabian This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race – and light on numbers from 2008's Folie a Deux, which they were booed for playing on their last tour. But the standard five-year-hiatus trick has quenched any animosity and, refreshingly, this year's album Save Rock and Roll finds a layer of punk artifice stripped from their boyband core. Wild Boys synths, Radio Ga Ga handclaps and the grandiloquent piano of Elton John's involvement now adorn FOB's songs of small-town teen angst that champion self-belief, defiance and the unifying power of punk rock. Desperation, submission or disguise, as FOB reapply for the job of biggest band in the world, it somehow feels like a pop insurrection worth backing.
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