The three-song set, which featured chart-topping hits "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light 'Em Up)" and "Centuries," was backed by the Central Florida Community Arts Symphony Orchestra and accompanied by a pyrotechnical show that would make an outdoor festival headliner like Rammstein jealous.
"I think it's always cool when someone is like listen, if you dream it, we can make it happen," bassist Pete Wentz said. "So, that's what we did. We're doing a version of Fall Out Boy on steroids, which is cool."
Part of the excitement for the band was introducing an orchestral element to add new life to songs they have performed for a decade or more.
"It was fun that I got to sit down and write a string arrangement for those songs that I never imagined having strings on," guitarist and composer Patrick Stump said. "It was cool and it was a fun experiment, for sure.
"It's amazing the way that everything has come together, the choreography and everything. It was pretty impressive."
Fall Out Boy knew they had to be on top of their game Saturday. They played at the 2015 NHL All-Star Game in Columbus and got a taste of how rabid hockey fans can be. They also performed at the 2018 Stanley Cup Final.
"The fans are just kind of insane, which makes for a good show," Wentz said with a laugh.
The band hit the mark from the opening note when Wentz and Stump marched to the stage through a phalanx of NHL mascots to begin the show, including Wentz's favorite mascot, Gritty from the Philadelphia Flyers.
"I mean, it's just like such bizarre character," he said. "You know, it's like if you drew it up, and then they just made it exactly how you drew it up."
The Grammy-nominated pop/punk band has a new album coming out March 24. "So Much (for) Stardust" will be Fall Out Boy's eighth studio album.
"Love From the Other Side," a single from the album, was the first song in the set, and the band was excited to introduce it to an audience outside their most hardcore fans.
"I think this is the first time we're really playing this song in front of a lot of people, Stump said. "It is going to be insane."
In a way, the performance served as a final sneak peek for the drop of the release next month and the massive summer tour to follow. The excitement for each is building for the band, which last released an album five years ago and did a full North American tour two years ago.
"We talked about the idea of, you know, if we did another follow up, we record or if we toured more than it just would need to be important because you're leaving your family and your kind of life there, and so we wanted to make something that felt important to us," Wentz said. "And we also like realized we've been a band for 20-plus years and we have a lot of different eras, you know, whatever, and wanted to make a record that kind of combined some of those in a way that we hadn't before."
