Into this milieu entered Ruess in 2001 with The Format, the band he started with Sam Means, a school buddy from his hometown of Peoria, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. Their debut Interventions + Lullabies catalogs average-kid experiences like the thrill of surprise parties, anxieties about moving away to college, idling in traffic, and smoking on the porch. However modest their subjects, the songs were delivered with a plainspoken wistfulness that was intensely earnest but rarely impassioned.

When Ruess groused in The Format's "The First Single," "I've been waiting all this time to be something I can't define," and "I've just gotta get myself over me," I, at age 13, was right there with him. So were plenty of other high school- and college-age fans who were too cool for Top 40 but too timid to mount countercultural rebellions. For a time, Drive-Thru Records, Vagrant, and Fueled by Ramen, Fun.'s current label, offered a comfortable place in the middle. Founded in Sherman Oaks, California in 1996 and later overtaken by Geffen, Drive-Thru in particular was a mainstay of pop-punk and emo music for young crowds. Antonoff's Steel Train signed in 2003, adding a folk dimension to a lineup that included a little ska (Rx Bandits), piano rock (Something Corporate), and post-hardcore (The Movielife) alongside its bread-and-butter pop-punk acts (New Found Glory). Vagrant, now a prominent indie rock label, was originally home to Alkaline Trio, Dashboard Confessional, and The Get Up Kids. Whatever their aesthetic bent, these artists noticeably reduced the stakes set by the previous generation's punk-rockers, preferring a forthright, irony-free melancholy.

In its way, Fun.is no less sentimental than those forebears. "I'm still not sure what I stand for," Ruess sings on the new album's title track, "most nights I don't know anymore." But the showiness of that sentiment has changed. On the band's sophomore album Some Nights, his big, elastic voice slices through the lush instrumentation, which was overseen by Jeff Bhasker, the hot-shot producer Kanye West recruited for 808s & Heartbreak and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Bhasker's ear for dramatic contrasts—and expertise with vocoder—isn't wasted here. Thumping beats and military drums turn nearly every song into a sort of loser's anthem, making Some Nights a grandiose power-pop album as well as a commercially savvy piece of work.