100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #91 Jimmy Eat World – Sweetness

Released: 2001

All the best bands don’t really fit in. Jimmy Eat World formed in Mesa, Arizona in 1993, a state which whilst not exactly hostile to the sort of music pumped out on college radio – this was after all the brief heyday of Tempe’s Gin Blossoms – had very little pedigree or infrastructure to support the people making it.

From their humbler beginnings playing anywhere they could – venues including singer Jim Adkins once recounted church halls and friend’s basements – the quartet eventually came to the attention of major label Capitol, for whom they made two albums, the second of which, Clarity has now acquired cult status, before being uncermeoniously dropped.

Unperturbed, Adkins and co then sharpened up the nascent emo sound of their earlier works and then loaded up on riffs and hooks. The result was Bleed American, released in July 2001 but which had to be temporarily renamed two months later in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The timing was unfortunate, but for the first time in their misfit history the band were really onto something, gargantuan hit The Middle colonising MTV for what seemed like months.

Landed with the emo tag before anybody knew what it really was, lyrically Sweetness dealt with the lack of connection when feelings for someone aren’t reciprocated, but it’s crunching heft owed more to garage punk than the gothic tropes the wider movement ended up being associated with. Regardless it seemed with it that Jimmy Eat World were out there again, a spare part of a jigsaw nobody else had any of the pieces to.