"Sugar, We're Goin Down" by Fall Out Boy from the album From Under the Cork Tree (2005)

Suicide is not emo, but attempted suicide is: because “emo” isn’t “emotional” so much as “overly dramatic and attention-starved.” A pre-Ashlee Simpson Pete Wentz bottomed out in 2004, caught up in the pressure to follow up the success of the band’s Take This to Your Grave. A regimen of therapy and mainlining sarcasm produced the band’s breakthrough album, From Under the Cork Tree, the following year, a Pixie Stix orgy of giddy nihilism buoyed by this, their biggest hit. Like most FOB tunes, the lyrics are a pastiche of clichés and slogans crooned by frontman Patrick Stump in a singsong swoon atop a pillowy cloud of background “ooh”s, pretending to deflect attention from the jilted pain that is at the song’s core. But this was head-down bummercore for those too cool to come right out and say it.

_Daniel Brockman