The other day while I ate Vietnamese food and sat across from a tall glass of water, I heard a Fall Out Boy song on the overhead radio. It was some new hit of theirs, a football commercial rhythm that was written as such, something I couldn’t say I’ve heard before. Any other song, any other band, and I would have generously ignored whatever pumped through those speakers, but I knew it was Fall Out Boy and I couldn’t stop myself from paying attention. The instruments were unrecognizable, as was the melody, and the only aspect that I truly understood to be Fall Out Boy was Patrick Stump’s unmistakable voice — the dude can still sing — but I remained puzzled. What happened to Fall Out Boy’s sound? When did I fall out of touch?

In 2007, Fall Out Boy released Infinity On High, the much-anticipated follow-up to their breakthrough 2005 album, From Under The Cork Tree. That’s when it began to go awry. At the time, reception for Infinity On High was optimistically mixed and a little odd for an emo rock band that had teenagers shouting eighties movies references with swooping haircuts. Fall Out Boy was still enjoying the highs of From Under The Cork Tree, so it was tough to gauge if Infinity On High’s reception was genuine or leftover.

Still, the album goes places no Fall Out Boy fan expected. Jay-Z opens Infinity On High with a spoken word intro, Babyface produces two songs, it clocks in at 47 minutes but feels like 120, it has only two breakout singles, and the song titles aren’t doing any favors. “You’re Crashing But You’re No Wave,” “Don’t You Know Who I Think I Am?” are forgettable titles that can only confuse. The album begins with a song called “Thriller.” You know, THRILLER, the Michael Jackson album and hit that forever made that word his own. Infinity On High is Fall Out Boy’s Magical Mystery Tour of nonsense wrapped in pretension. And it all makes sense now given their career trajectory.

Not to seriously compare Fall Out Boy to The Beatles, but you have to suspect that when Magical Mystery Tour came out after Sgt. Pepper people were like “Oh, lol, I love it!” But then came The White Album and Yellow Submarine and people were like “Oh, they’re this band now, huh?” That’s what happened to Fall Out Boy post-Infinity On High. The Beatles just knew when to go back to basics and quit within five years.

It’s been ten years since Infinity On High, though, and it took Fall Out Boy one more album and then three years of “decompressing” to return to where they picked up with Infinity On High. 2013’s Save Rock And Roll is the proper follow-up to that album, and 2015’s American Beauty/American Psycho is the super follow-up to that entire direction. No longer are they keeping up with their older fans, writing tunes for people my age to listen to and actively respond toward. Fall Out Boy is doing the thing they’ve wanted to do since 2007 which is blend genres centered around Patrick Stump’s absorbing singing style (there’s a reason why every band post-From Under The Cork Tree tried intimidating Stump’s vocal delivery — it’s all-encompassing).

However, looking back, Infinity On High is a peak in its inclusiveness. For 2007, a rock album featuring Jay-Z is pretty groundbreaking considering Fall Out Boy’s fan demographics. And Babyface is a bold move for producing two singles off the album. Nowadays, no band would have the guts to make such a decision, let alone the opportunity. You don’t see any hip-hop artist being featured on the new Mumford and Sons album. That crossover doesn’t happen. The fact that Fall Out Boy chose Babyface to produce the two singles off the album is remarkable in and of itself; they knew ahead of time that these were the songs people were going to hear no matter what. They cared about breaking the mold of what was considered pop-punk or punk rock or emo at the time. “Fuck you, we have Jay-Z on our record.”

They kept up with that attitude. Folie à Deux, Fall Out Boy’s 2009 and at-one-time final album, had appearances from Lil Wayne, Debbie Harry, and Elvis Costello. Then on Save Rock And Roll, Fall Out Boy featured Courtney Love, Big Sean, and Elton John. At one point, these were all regarded as eye rolls by fans, not realizing that Fall Out Boy was simply using their popularity to give their songs more of an audience, including an older crowd along with a different genre of music. It’s respectable. It’s unique and fresh. It’s smart, too. They were doing something different and it still is different today, ten years later.

I used to know everything about Fall Out Boy. Their first album was called Evening Out With Your Girlfriend and is appropriately missing from Spotify (for the best), “Hum Hallelujah” is about songwriter/bassist Pete Wentz’s suicide attempt in a mall parking lot, the opening track on From Under The Cork Tree had the phrase “MySpace whore” in it but it was quickly changed before release due to legal reasons, Patrick Stump’s real last name is Stumph, and they were never that great live. My memory of Fall Out Boy resides between 2004 and 2007, not the current iteration. Their legacy to me is forever there despite my best effort to grow up, but I still wonder about them. I’m glad that ten years after Infinity On High they’re still doing what they do best even if I’m not always listening. They’re still standing out.