The Abridged History of Panic! at the Disco, emo's capsized Ship of Theseus

If you've paid any attention to what's on the radio in the mid-aughts to the present day, you've probably heard of Panic! at the Disco. You've probably heard some of their songs. And barring all that, you've probably, at the very least, heard the name somewhere. And if you haven't heard any of this, you may count yourself lucky that you're about to hear all of it for the first time. Strap in, because this is going to be a ride.

The story of Panic! is a long, tumultuous, and ultimately tragic one. It has seen incredible highs and undeniable lows. Outside of a dedicated fanbase, the general take on Panic! at the Disco is that the band used to be good, or maybe your younger teenage self thought it used to be good, but now...not so much. Something changed in those intervening years, and the bizarre history of the band makes it difficult to underscore a firm delineation when the band fell out of public favor before ending formally after 19 years.

A couple preliminary warnings out of the way: this post is going to get long, and it's going to touch on some heavy stuff. There are going to be mentions of people's struggles with substance abuse and familial abuse. There are going to be mentions of abuse of power dynamics, harassment (including sexual harassment) of all sorts of people, including minors, and more. There are also going to be mentions and discussions of stalking and the like. I'm going to preface each section with any warnings that might be merited; this by no means completely permeates the whole discussion, but it's going to be present nonetheless.

As for my credentials: I've frequented enough bandom spaces to be intimately familiar with most Panic! lore that I wasn't personally there for. I'm well-read on every source on the internet that hasn't submitted to link rot and so forth, and I took the time to interview and discuss things such as fan reception with long-term, old-school Panic! fans. I am and always have been primarily a Fall Out Boy fan, which means this drama has been just peripheral enough for me to not really be involved, but also has enough proximity to be interesting. No personal involvement whatsoever; my stake in this is the sheer schadenfreude.

But before I talk about how we got here, let me quickly define a couple important terms.

• Bandom: A word that initially started as a portmanteau of "bandslash" and "fandom," with "bandslash" referring to...well, slash shipping. More on that below. Nowadays it's mostly a way of referring to a fandom surrounding a band. And more specifically, if someone in most online spaces (especially Twitter or Tumblr) says "bandom," they're usually going to be referring to a particular subset of bandom that got massive in the early aughts and never really went away. It started off on AIM and Livejournal before migrating to Tumblr, and later to Twitter and TikTok. That subset being...
• The Emo Trinity: Or the "Holy Trinity" of emo. The inherent ridiculousness of the term aside, it's the one that stuck. This name refers to the power trio of Fall Out Boy ("the father"), Panic! at the Disco ("the son"), and My Chemical Romance ("the holy ghost"). And yes, there was and still is a very heated debate over whether any of these groups count as "emo." For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to table that debate as irrelevant here. Regardless of genre, these three groups were undeniably very closely linked (and still are, in many ways) and they were seen as the three biggest in bandom. Fan overlap between these three was huge - a fan of one was very likely to be fans of the other two. Obviously for this post, I'm going to be focusing on Panic!, but their status within the trinity is an important factor. The term "Emo Trinity" really only got prominent in the early 2010s (evidence suggests that it originated from a post on Tumblr made in 2013), but these three bands were seen as the big bands long before then. Almost all other bands within the scene were defined by their relationship to one or many of them.
• Shipping: As in "relationship." Shipping is the act of wanting to see or explore two characters in a relationship of some kind, be it sexually or romantically. When someone specifies "slash," that means it's going to be gay (usually male/male pairings, as female/female pairings are usually referred to as "femslash"), which is where "bandslash" comes from. Except, see, in bandom, you don't really have any characters to smash together like Barbie dolls, which bring us to our next term.
• RPF: Short for "real person fiction," which involves fanfiction written about real people as though they were characters. Yes, this has been and continues to be the source of ethical debate within fan spaces. Some people embrace RPF, some are violently turned off by it, and everything in between. It is an aspect of bandom that should not be ignored, however, particularly because RPF doesn't even scratch the surface.
• Tinhatting: A term that started as a portmanteau of "tinfoil" and "asshat." This is the act of actively speculating on a real person's real life, most often in the form of romantic relationships. If you're confused about the difference between this and RPF, the simplest way to separate them is thus: RPF is "here's a story involving two real people and how I think they'd fuck, regardless of whether or not it's realistic," and tinhatting is "I actually think these people are in a relationship and I have the conspiracy board to prove it." And yes, there is also a fair degree of overlap here. Some people who are into RPF don't endorse tinhatting, some people who write and read RPF are active tinhatters, and so on. It's a muddy area, again especially in the way of ethics. And again, it's pretty important to the history of bandom in this post.

I think that covers everything. Now, on to the meat and potatoes.

In the early aughts, the pop-punk and emo resurgence was taking off in earnest. Besides established pop0punk groups like Blink-182 and Green Day having a lot of radio airplay, newer groups like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance were picking up speed on Warped Tour, and you could hear "Sugar We're Goin' Down" and "I'm Not Okay" on the radios wherever you went. And in 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada, one ardent fan of all those groups was determined to break into the fast-growing scene.

Our story begins with one George Ryan Ross III, better known as Ryan Ross (guitar). He was joined by childhood friend Spencer Smith (drums), and together the two of them started a band called "Pet Salamander," later changed to "The Summer League". The Summer League got its start playing very small shows in the area, with Ross on lead vocals, and it cribbed a great deal of inspiration from pop-punk bands like Blink-182. But Ross was also a big fan of both Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, and especially the former. He was a frequent poster on Fall Out Boy forums and Livejournal fangroups, and was particularly fixated on the band's bassist and de facto frontman, Pete Wentz. He liked to hang around and talk with Wentz after shows, and even chatted on AIM with him a few times. To say Ross idolized Wentz would perhaps be an understatement; his username on the Livejournal forums was "i_amclandestine," with Clandestine Industries being the name of Wentz's now-defunct clothing line. By today's standards, Ross's fixation on Wentz would likely be considered...for lack of a better word, pretty parasocial. We're talking "logging onto Fall Out Boy fan forums and Livejournal groups and snapping at how the fanbase largely composed of teenage girls couldn't possibly understand the real depth to Pete Wentz's lyrics, and these posers don't have any idea what the scene even IS and they all probably just care that he's HOT and don't actually think about the lyrics" levels of parasocial.

In the midst of this, Ross and Smith managed to secure a bassist in the form of another local high schooler, Brent Wilson (bass). Wilson also knew this guy in his class with some killer vocals, and introduced Brendon Urie (vocals) to the band. While Ross was initially the lead vocalist (as well as the guitarist, lyricist, and primary songwriter), he agreed that Urie had the clear, distinct tenor that would be ideal for the direction he was aiming toward. The Summer League was primarily rooted in the pop-punk stylings akin to Blink-182, but Ross was already thinking about changing their sonic direction to something a little more in the vein of Fall Out Boy.

Thus, Panic! at the Disco was born. The name of the band was cribbed from the song "Panic" by the American pop-punk band Name Taken. The original four-man lineup consisted of Ross, Smith, Urie, and Wilson. Except, oh yeah, three out of these four people were still in high school, with Ross (himself only barely out of high school) as the only exception. As the primary composer of the music, he wrote most of their songs electronically on his computer, meaning not all of the band actually knew how to play much of this music. Urie was also a practicing Mormon at the time, and wouldn't so much as stay up too late without his parents' permission.

But Ross was determined. He constantly plugged his band's demos on forums - from FOB fan-groups to snapping bathroom selfies in Livejournal groups for scene and emo kids - pursuing this dream with a relentlessness that would, eventually, be rewarded. Because one day, someone on a FOB Livejournal forum posted a link to some early Panic! demos on Purevolume with the comment that the lead vocalist sounds an awful lot like Patrick Stump (Fall Out Boy's lead vocalist), don't you guys think?

In a move that sounds like it came out of a Wattpad fanfiction but is too well-documented to be false, this worked. Pete Wentz reached out to Ryan Ross within a matter of hours, asking for his email (it was blinkexists182@aol.com, if you were wondering). Fall Out Boy was recording in Los Angeles at the time, so Wentz drove all the way to Las Vegas to meet this band of literal teenagers. Oh yeah, did I mention that Wentz didn't even have a label?

Well, technically he did. He had just christened a vanity label called Decaydance Records, an imprint of Fueled By Ramen (the label wherein Fall Out Boy got their start before being upstreamed to Island Records). Wentz had no idea how to run a label or what running a label entailed, but hey, it meant he could sign some sweet new bands. And that also worked, because one of the first bands Wentz ever signed was Panic! at the Disco.

So, yes. Panic! at the Disco got its start because Ryan Ross badgered Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy on Livejournal to the point where the latter drove out to Vegas to meet an inexperienced band mostly composed of high schoolers who had never played any of their songs live before. But Wentz loved what he heard. He loved those demos so much that he immediately signed this band and began hyping them online. Wentz, a frequent blogger in the age of Livejournal forums, was ready to harness one of the most powerful things in the word: a fanbase of very passionate teenage girls. He promised that these kids would be your new favorite band. He wore custom-made Panic! merch at Fall Out Boy shows and talked up their yet-to-be-released first record. He seemed totally committed to the idea that Panic! at the Disco would be the next big thing.

Again, Panic! hadn't even played a live show as a complete band at this point. Three of them were high schoolers who had a couple demos written on their guitarist's computer on Garageband, and they'd just gotten the deal of a lifetime. Just to crunch things down from the (very shaky) timeline that longtime fans have been able to pin down: Wilson and Urie joined The Summer League in spring or summer of 2004, Panic! began promoting themselves in earnest in early fall of 2004, and they met and got signed by Wentz in late fall of 2004 (around or after Thanksgiving). Smith estimated that they met with Wentz maybe "six months" of meeting Urie.

Right away, there was discourse. People were skeptical of this band for getting their start when they hadn't even put the proper work in, in their minds. Ross and Smith had been playing in bands since they were sixteen, but the band itself was pretty green as a group. On top of that, plenty of prospective fans were wary that this band was just aping their predecessors to cash in on a trend. Ross, at least, was fully prepared for this, even expecting it, and he'd already decided the best course of action was to ignore whatever was going on in the messageboards and channel all that spite and frustration and pressure into the music.

There was a lot riding on Panic! at the Disco's debut. Not only did the band have to prove themselves to the industry at large, but they had to impress an awful lot of people who had already written them off due to their origins - and they had to do this in a scene that was rapidly becoming saturated with other acts eager to get in on the new hotness.

With one of the biggest bands in the scene backing their play, Panic! began fleshing out their first record. In May 2005, Fall Out Boy issued their sophomore release, From Under the Cork Tree, which took their popularity to new heights and paved the way for later acts to follow. Decaydance and Fueled By Ramen were creating a whole label of associated acts - other bands like Gym Class Heroes, The Academy Is..., and Cobra Starship sprang up around this time, and the label was incredibly tight-knit. The Decaydance bands frequently guested on each others' songs and did production work on one another's albums. Brendon Urie actually made his vocal debut on From Under the Cork Tree, adding guest vocals to the track "7 Minutes in Heaven (Atavan Halen)," before Panic! had released their own debut record. Wentz was using his fame as a springboard to jettison other acts into the spotlight, and it worked.

But none of them landed with quite as big and lasting a splash as Panic! at the Disco.

Panic!'s first studio album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, was released in September of 2005, and it was heartily ambitious in scope: forty minutes of dance-funk-infused baroque-pop emo-rock, lyrical skewer-work dripping with references to Chuck Palahniuk and discussing fraught matters such as infidelity and addiction...penned and performed by four kids barely out of high school, who were not old enough to drink (let alone forget lost lovers in cabarets and pray for love in lap dances), and delivered by a lead singer who used to skip band practice to attend church. It drew from dark, poetic imagery, and was at times harrowingly personal: the primary lyricist and composer, Ross, dedicated several tracks to a tumultuous teenage love life fraught with cheating, but also explicit discussion of troubled home life with an alcoholic father (most notably "Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks," and "Camisado"), all delivered with catchy pop hooks.

Critics hated it. Well okay, they didn't exactly hate it. But they didn't exactly love it. Critically, it was fairly polarizing. The more outspoken critics called the Panic! newcomers a painfully derivative Fall Out Boy sound-alike (and the fact that they were signed to Pete Wentz's label naturally didn't help). Some critics panned the lead vocals, and others felt the splicing in of electronic synths and drum loops to be in equal parts lazy and jarring. Just another band trying to capitalize on the trends of the time: replete with bad haircuts, whiny lyrics, and obnoxiously long song titles. Maybe it was the timing, maybe it was the state of the scene at the time, or maybe it was the age of the band members who were trying to communicate some fairly deep subject matter despite their ages (Ross and Urie were 18, but Wilson and Smith were still 17 at the time of recording Fever). Whatever the case, Fever debuted very shakily, critically speaking.

But that didn't end up mattering very much when the fans loved it. And how they loved it. They loved the aesthetic, the catchy hooks, and the lyricism. The music videos were in heavy rotation on MTV, back when MTV still mattered. The album's lead single, "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" became massive, certified platinum five times over as of this writing, and that single's staying power alone has arguably validated Panic!'s continued existence, because most everyone still recognizes it. It says a lot that, retroactively, for all the band's perils and pitfalls, Fever is still upheld as one of the crown jewels of the emo movement of the aughts. And whatever fans' opinions might be on the band today, Fever is oft regarded as the band at its very best.

A great deal of that probably comes from the sheer spectacle of the associated tour. With a heavy emphasis on theatricality, embracing a faux circus aesthetic, the tour was an immensely expensive and setpiece-heavy endeavor that nonetheless managed to set Panic! apart from the rest of their brethren. It wasn't just about the music; it was about putting on a show. The whole thing was punctuated with skits, tricks, dances, and the whole nine yards. One of the band's most iconic setpieces was a massive windmill that drummer Spencer Smith would cite as one of the reasons that the band didn't make much money while touring to promote Fever, because they had to pay to take it everywhere, and had difficulty getting it through the door of the venue in some cases.

Fever was so massive that this almost immediately cemented Panic! as one of the biggest players in town. The scene was dominated by both Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, and yet that power duo quickly became a trio when Panic! at the Disco landed with such bombast that they were seen as on the level of the other two bands, despite being younger than both. This was also in spite of the group's obvious inexperience. Their early shows were infamously sloppy, with rough vocals from Urie and the rest of the band struggling to play songs that their guitarist had written on his computer. The sheer speed with which this band went from fresh-faced high school graduates to touring across America probably had a lot to do with how out of their element they seemed. All the same, they quickly amassed a very dedicated fanbase.

However, despite the success of the album and tour, things within the band were far from perfect. Because not long after Fever's release, Panic! made an announcement to their fans: Brent Wilson, the band's bassist, would be parting ways with the rest of them.

This was in the band's very early infancy, and Wilson was far from the most recognizable member (Ross and Urie were easily the most recognizable faces, with Ross as the lyrical mastermind and composer and Urie as the lead vocalist). But back in the day, there was a lot of kerfuffle about this, in no small part because of just how vague the band was at the time. And while the band's official statement painted the separation as amicable, Wilson himself claimed that it was anything but. Wilson purported that he was ejected from the band via a phone call with Smith; the other two members were on the open line, but neither of them said a word.

Wilson's girlfriend and brother were deeply upset on the bassist's behalf and took to the messageboards and news outlets to post up a storm about it. Wilson's brother even disclosed purported AIM logs of Ross and Wentz's conversations that led to the band getting signed - these logs still float around on the internet today, though their veracity is still somewhat in question (and it's not really clear what Wilson stood to gain by sharing them, as there was nothing incriminating about any part of the exchange).

Panic! was firm on their decision, however. According to the rest of the band, Wilson was unreliable to a fault; he would show up to gigs late or not at all, and was markedly less than enthusiastic on stage. More to the point, Panic! said that he wasn't the best bassist, and Urie and Ross were responsible for all the bass parts on the actual recorded album. They also claimed they had to simplify the bass parts so that Wilson could perform them live. Wilson refuted this and insisted that he was instrumental in recording sessions with Fever, regardless of whether he played bass on the final tracks. Wilson's brother insinuated that there was a financial incentive to remove him from the lineup as well, considering that the band was just about to embark on a lengthy headlining tour and a touring member would likely be paid less than a full-time one. And while Wilson couldn't do a thing about missing the tour, he could sue for his portion of the royalties on the album itself - and sue the band he did. I did some digging and while Wilson's brother alleged on MySpace that Brent Wilson won the lawsuit, I can't find any definitive proof of this besides...a repost of a MySpace update from Wilson's brother on a fan guild post on GaiaOnline. So who knows how that worked out.

Fans were wary about this whole debacle; less because of any sense of loyalty toward Wilson (though he did have his fans), who to this day has little claim to fame besides "suggested Brendon Urie be the vocalist of Ryan Ross's band," and more because they were concerned over Panic!'s abrupt skyrocketing into global fame. They liked this band being what it was, and the age-old concern was beginning to arise when anyone's treasured thing gets to be known worldwide: they feared that this would be the herald for the band changing and god forbid, becoming more mainstream. Some speculated that this might signify a lack of loyalty within the band's ranks or, worse, that they might prioritize financial gain over one another.

Regardless, at the end of the day, the decision was final. Wilson allegedly received his share of royalties from A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, and that would have to be good enough. And while in the grand scheme of things, it was small, this would set an eerie precedent that would plague the band forevermore: from the moment of its first release, Panic! at the Disco would shed band members at an alarming rate, and the lineup would seldom stay the same between albums.

So Panic! was down a bassist, and at a very inconvenient time, too. Remember that big headlining tour they were just about to set out on? Their solution to this was to call their friend Jon Walker (bass), who got acquainted with them during a January 2006 tour. Walker was the touring bassist for Decaydance labelmates The Academy Is... during said tour, which was headlined by TAI with Panic! as support. Prior to Wilson getting kicked out, the band was unable to get into contact with him for a show. So they phoned Walker, who promptly flew in from Chicago, learned Panic!'s entire catalog by ear during the flight, and performed to a crowd of over 15,000 people without even having rehearsed with the full band. This was one of the final straws when it came to kicking Wilson and replacing him with Walker, who was much more enthusiastic, present, and to be blunt, good at playing bass. He had good credentials as TAI's touring bassist, and he was intimately familiar with the Chicago scene that spawned Fall Out Boy to boot (he played in Chicago-based pop-punk band 504 Plan, who were close with FOB in the early aughts).

At first it seemed like Wilson's initial claim that his eviction was financially motivated might have held water, since Walker was basically stepping in as a touring member to substitute the band's missing bassist and Wilson's brother purported that Walker would be paid far less than if he was contributing in the studio. However, Walker immediately became enmeshed in Panic!'s creative processes, and more to the point, Walker's reception was warm among fans, save for those still frosty about the first fracture within Panic!'s ranks. He quickly achieved a fanbase that Wilson simply never got.

With that shift in the lineup and an abrupt rocket to fame at a startling rate, there was really only one thing left for the band to do: plan a follow-up album.

A Fever You Can't Sweat Out was released in 2005. The band didn't release a sophomore album until 2008. In those three years, the band struggled heartily with how best to follow such a strong debut. There was a lot of pressure riding on them, and the band was still incredibly young - Walker was the oldest member at 22, and Smith was the youngest at only 19. To remedy their creative struggles, the band took a whole bunch of drugs, sequestered themselves in a cabin in Nevada, and got to work. This album was for a while known to fans primarily as "The Cabin Album" because of the circumstances of the recording process, and it never saw the light of day. Not long after the band departed the cabin, they ended up scrapping the album entirely.

The album's working title was Cricket & Clover, and Ross described it as a "modern fairy tale with a romantic twist." It was meant to be a subversive, sprawling concept album involving fictional characters and interlocking plotlines, and the whole band got involved - not just Ross, as was the case for much of Fever. The producer who worked with the band in those recording sessions, Rob Mathes, described it as a "really bizarre" project that was more akin to a film score than a conventional album. A couple of those tracks were performed live as teasers, but studio versions never surfaced, though some of the material would be recycled in later releases. Ultimately, the band collectively decided that Cricket & Clover wasn't the direction they wanted to go in. It was too esoteric, too ambitious, too out of left field, and it just plain wasn't fun to make. The album was scrapped by fall of 2007, and little remains of it aside from scant live performances, a handful of track titles, and old photographs of handwritten lyrics.

So the band went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. They took their sound and aesthetic in a completely new direction, switching from circus-fueled theatrics to a floral sixties pastiche. And then...they did the unthinkable. They dropped the exclamation point.

If fans were wary after that first lineup change, the excision of the exclamation point made them furious. It's difficult to overstate just how fervent the outcry was over this. The band was bombarded with online petitions and questions about where the damn exclamation point went. For almost all of 2008, they had to fend off this question in every single interview while trying to promote their new album.

In retrospect, it's easier now to pinpoint why fans were so livid over the exclamation point. This, along with the abrupt pivot away from the sound the band captured on Fever that felt so reminiscent of the emo-pop movement the kids knew and loved, made it seem to some like the band resented their roots, and were trying to distance themselves from the space that had birthed them. People weren't sure at all how to feel about Panic's jarring shift from the faux circus aesthetic and spectacle that defined them on their debut to the stylings of their sophomore album. The altered lineup combined with the new sound had already made fans deeply uncertain as to the future of the band, but the label was also wary about this new sonic experimentation, which was so different from the vaudeville/cabaret-esque Fever.

Panic at the Disco released their second studio album, Pretty. Odd. in March of 2008. Written and recorded in the span of about three months after the band scrapped Cricket & Clover, Pretty was a far cry from the baroque emo-pop that people associated with them, instead cribbing its inspiration from the sixties acid rock, most prominently and openly from the works of The Beatles. Pretty dabbled in folk rock and psychedelic pop, with a lyricism and aesthetic that were overwhelmingly happy in comparison to the embitterment and scorn present on Fever. The song-writing was more collaborative this go around too: all four members contributed to the composition and lyricism, as opposed to Ross doing most of the heavy-lifting. Walker jumped right into contributing to the songwriting, and supplied the foundations for the album's first and arguably most recognizable single, "Nine in the Afternoon." Urie also got to participate in more of the song-writing, penning tracks like "Folkin' Around" and "I Have Friends in Holy Spaces" mostly on his own. And Ross contributed more studio vocals this time around, lending backing vocals to multiple tracks such as "Northern Downpour," and even taking lead vocals on the track, "Behind the Sea."

For the most part, critics responded much more warmly to this foray, praising the band for being inventive and refusing to cater to what was a guaranteed formula for success by making the same record twice. Others were less than impressed, and felt like Pretty lifted too much from its inspiration without much original thought. But the mixed reviews were nothing compared to the way the fans reacted. This was the polar opposite of the catchy pop hooks and tangled Palahniuk-inspired lyricism that so many loved in Fever. Unlike its predecessor, Pretty boasted lush, Beatles-esque melodies, complete with dreamy, and at times deliberately nonsensical lyricism. A lot of fans were confused, and where they weren't confused, they were angry that the band's sound had changed too much.

The record, perhaps predictably, did not do quite as well as its predecessor. While it debuted at #2 on the Billboard charts, it didn't have the same staying power that Fever did, and quickly dropped to #11 within the span of its first week. Nonetheless, the band threw themselves headfirst into the album's aesthetic as they embarked on the tour to promote it. While the circus-tent theatrics were gone, their commitment to visual spectacle remained; for much of the Pretty. Odd. era, the sets were bedecked in flowers and woodland setpieces. This was also reflected in the band's efforts toward eco-activism during this time, which tied in with the general tone of the album and tour.

The legacy of Pretty. Odd. is arguably more defined by that which followed it, but time has been kinder to the album than many fans were at first release. The same cannot be said for the band; "Nine in the Afternoon" is the sole track that (occasionally) got played live from this era in 2010s and 2020s-era Panic! shows. Nonetheless, Pretty. Odd. has accrued its own devotees over time, many of whom resent how little acknowledgment it gets. The album was, in some ways, one of the final nails in the coffin for the "emo" movement of the mid-to-late aughts, as one of the flagship groups that defined the average listener's impression of the genre did a sharp pivot away from it. And like it or not, the emo movement was on a bit of a downturn at this point; it had already hit its peak in 2006 and 2007 with the release of genre-defining albums like My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade and Fall Out Boy's Infinity on High, and by 2008, radios weren't as infatuated with the scene as they once were. To put things in perspective: by 2008, the #1 Billboard single of the year was Flo Rida's "Low."

But Pretty's rocky release was nothing compared to that which would follow.

Through much of late 2008, Ross and Walker were already talking about coming up with a wealth of material for a prospective third studio album. But come early 2009, while Panic was still touring to support Pretty, many fans started taking note that things seemed...off. It wasn't just the whole sonic and aesthetic shift, but there was also less banter between the band members during live shows, and as the tour moved to South Africa, there were almost no pictures of the full band together.

And then, come July 6, 2009, Panic issued an announcement to their fans: Ryan Ross and Jon Walker would be departing from the band and going their own way, creatively.

The initial story was quite amiable, but later accounts cast a darker light on what exactly had transpired here. The crux of it is that the members cited creative differences. Ross and Walker preferred the retro rock of Pretty and were pushing toward that direction for the third Panic album, whereas Urie and Smith (who had moved in together and were beginning to form their own creative duo independent of the other two), wanted to progress their sound from the slick baroque-pop sound they developed on Fever. No mess, no drama; the two halves of the band simply wanted to make their own songs.

The fandom fractured. This is the point where, for many, Panic at the Disco stopped being a full band. In their eyes, the very heart and soul of Panic rested upon the creative dynamic between Ross and Urie. While there was certainly tension between the two of them in the creative sense, this was not an unusual thing to see in music, and many Panic fans saw this as the driving force behind the band's magic. But more to the point, some insisted it wasn't fair. This was Ryan Ross's band first, wasn't it? He was the lyricist, the primary songwriter, and the one who had gotten the band noticed in the first place.

People quickly began picking sides, for the most part preaching their loyalties as to whether they would be in the Ross camp or the Urie one (Walker and Smith were not seen as the central players here). And part of that has to do with the narrative that surrounded Panic, as it tended to surround many of the bands in the scene. It was a dynamic that would become forever enmeshed with the mythology of the band and the split and everything that came after, for better or worse:

Ryden.

That is to say, the "ship" of Ryan Ross/Brendon Urie, romantically. Ryden was and remains to this day one of the biggest and most immediately notable ships within bandom. Just as Panic was the third leg of the emo triangle, Ryden was the third leg of the three slash ships that dominated virtually all fanfiction spaces within bandom. Ryan/Brendon was to Panic as Pete/Patrick was to Fall Out Boy and Frank/Gerard was to My Chemical Romance. The grip this particular pairing had on everyone cannot be overstated. There's an in-joke in bandom that the musician Halsey was "the Ryden that made it," and this wasn't without merit - Halsey was very much a bandom kid who read RPF like most of them, and has been pretty up-front about this. Ryden was so firmly entrenched in bandom that even as attitudes toward Panic shifted, the pairing remained very much at the forefront. (It might interest you to know that there's a novel-length fanfiction starring the Ross/Urie pairing that features a whole host of Decaydance bandmembers as background characters, that many of said bandmembers have read and quoted, and that one of Ross's exes has even had printed and bound. Bandom is wild.)

This pairing didn't come out of nowhere. There was a media focus on the creative push and pull between Urie and Ross, who even at the start clashed over songwriting. Ross drafted the lyrics and Urie sang them even though Ross was initially the vocalist, so right from the start there was a compelling creative friction. And as was the case with most all-male bands that sprang into being during the mid-aughts, there was a certain degree of "stage gay," employed both as statement and spectacle. Urie was particularly handsy with all of his bandmates, milking the homoerotic tension for all it was worth on stage. The press took notice, and were eager to question the bandmembers on this. Off stage, fans didn't have to look very far to find ways to fuel their reading of this relationship: a great deal of Fever cribbed from the writings of the openly gay Chuck Palahniuk, and Urie confessed that the first time he ever went to a bar, it was while sneaking into a gay bar with Ross while the two of them were underage. Add in the trends of guyliner that flourished in the emo scene at the time, not to mention the elaborate makeup and androgynous fashion that Panic preferred during Fever's touring, and you had a lot of trendy mid-aughts homophobia directed at the band even if all the members demonstrably identified as straight at the time. It wasn't hard for a fanbase - a not insignificant portion of which was composed of queer or questioning kids - to project something else onto that template.

And what does this have to do with the split? Nothing whatsoever! But like it or not, the split forcibly altered the band's trajectory forever. There was a before and an after: pre-split and post-split Panic. To this day you'll find people who still refer to this as the band "breaking up," even though formally, it's mostly referred to as a split. When people talk about old Panic at the Disco, they mean "pre-split Panic," specifically. And because the statements to the press and to fans were so repetitively polite and amiable, because it was stressed multiple times that there was no animosity between the band members, because the split really did seem to be driven by creative differences, fans were desperate to assign a secondary meaning to this heartbreaking event. They needed it to mean something more than two parties taking different creative paths. It wasn't drugs, it wasn't money, it wasn't jealousy...so it had to be something else, right? There was public and extremely audible speculation that the split was fueled by romantic or sexual feelings between Ross and Urie, unrequited or perhaps not, and that this was the real reason behind the fissure that split the band in two.

One of the most mythical fanon moments behind this theorizing was the so-called "truth behind Northern Downpour." "Northern Downpour" was one of the singles off of Pretty. Odd. (and also the name of the official Panic fanclub at the time), and it notably had both Ross and Urie singing together in the studio and live versions. Ross admitted that this particular track was especially personal, and had to work to get Urie to vocally convey what he wanted it to. It was performed very rarely after the split, with Urie visibly breaking down in the process as he took on the vocals solo. For many fans, this had to mean something. Had something happened during Pretty. Odd. to make the band fracture? Was it a tumultuous romance? Or perhaps it went back even further, during the production of the "Cabin Album," Cricket & Clover? Or maybe it was some particular inciting incident...some horrible altercation that happened while on tour in Cape Town, South Africa? These kinds of phrases and scenarios were heavily mythologized in fandom, particularly in the RPF and tinhatting communities, and nothing was ever truly ruled out.

While the circumstances behind the split were benign on first pass, later interviews and the benefit of hindsight would reveal the cracks in that façade as well. In a fifteenth-anniversary retrospective on Pretty. Odd., Walker revealed that he felt like he joined the band in the midst of when it was already falling apart, citing "a lot of clashing of personalities and opinions." After Walker and Ross went their separate ways, they formed their own group, entitled The Young Veins, after which they would later remark that they assumed the band had been formally ending, and didn't actually realize that Smith and Urie would be keeping the Panic name and continuing the band without them. The first single released under the post-split Panic name was "New Perspective," done for the soundtrack to the 2009 horror film Jennifer's Body - work on it began two years prior, based on a dream Urie had. Smith and Urie finished the song up on their own before the split had actually occurred, and the fact that they'd formed their own creative duo arguably may have driven the band apart even faster.

And while the turbulence between Ross and Urie, projected or not, was well-documented, not much was spared for the fracture that may have occurred between Smith and Ross who, together, had founded the band to begin with. Nor that of what had become of the duo of Ross and his idol, Wentz, who seemed more or less neutral on the matter at the time and claimed to still be in contact with Ross. Wentz commented that the split did indeed seem driven by creative differences, and that he was willing to sign The Young Veins onto Decaydance if they wanted - but for whatever reason, this never came to pass. Yet of all the narratives surrounding the split, Ross and Urie by far got the most traction - both by slash fans and by those who desperately wanted to see them resolve their differences and reunite. There were a lot of very dedicated subsections of bandom that sought out any clues that a Panic reunion or reformation might one day come to pass, and they weren't the only ones; Ross and Urie both attending Adam Levine's Halloween party in 2015 was once such a notable event that it got celebrity gossip press coverage.

Ross and Walker's post-Panic project, The Young Veins, released one album, Take A Vacation! which had a very similar musical styling to Pretty. Odd. (they even worked with the same producer, Rob Mathes, for multiple tracks), before the new incarnation of Panic had even teased a new album of their own. One of the tracks on their debut album was simply entitled "Cape Town," leading fans to speculate wildly that this was about the band's split, with the more salacious rumors centering on a painful romantic breakup between Urie and Ross. (What really happened in Cape Town? Ross became hopelessly infatuated with a girl he just met after a long-term relationship ended and nearly risked everything to stay with her but for Walker talking him out of it.)

Naturally, much of the press surrounding The Young Veins and their debut revolved around the split with Panic, and the response from Ross and Walker was...lukewarm, mostly. They had nothing bad to say about their former band, but by their own admission, they weren't really speaking much to each other anymore. The press naturally saw fit to dig into a supposed rivalry between the two, but public statements remained mostly cordial. On the whole, some fans were willing to give both The Young Veins and the new version of Panic a chance, but many saw fit to pick sides - and without question, the lion's share of the attention went to the band that had a well-established fanbase.

The Young Veins went on hiatus not long after their debut, and have released no further music since.

The shadow of the split would stalk the remaining members of the band, and the very legacy of Panic at the Disco, for the rest of its tenure.

In a good PR move, Panic restored that jaunty exclamation point to their name mere days after the split, which mollified fans to some degree. Both Urie and Smith repeatedly stressed that they were still on good terms with Ross and Walker, and that both halves of the split were excited to see what the other half would turn out. But the split was still too fresh and the fans too divided. Some had thrown in with Ross and aggressively cut this new version of Panic! out of their lives. Others sided with Urie, since he was for many the most recognizable face of the band despite not being its primary composer or lyricist.

And speaking of the Emo Trinity, things were not in a good way for the scene at large, which is in part why Pretty didn't do so well on release. There was a massive paradigm shift following the 2008 election, and suddenly the spiteful, angry frustration of the mid-to-late aughts was no longer trendy. At the end of 2009, Fall Out Boy announced they were going on hiatus after their 2008 release Folie à Deux underperformed, and the members went their separate ways; this hiatus was so seismic an event that it was oft referred to as a break-up, and the band's future at the time felt incredibly uncertain. At the other leg of the trinity, My Chemical Romance were struggling to follow up their incredibly successful third album, The Black Parade. Their 2010 release saw a radical shift in sound from rock-and-roll theatricality to synth-infused breakneck pop-rock in their fourth studio album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, and this was met with a far less grandiose reception than its predecessor by both fans and critics. That sonic shift was in many ways a microcosm of the broader transition that was taking place at the time in the music world at large.

And in the midst of this, Panic! had fractured. Exclamation point or no exclamation point, the band was struggling. Ross had been a huge part of the band's songwriting process, and Urie and Smith had trouble filling the void alone.

To start, they recruited two new members: Ian Crawford (guitar) to replace Ross, and Dallon Weekes (bass), to replace Walker. Both had experience working in the scene from which Panic! was spawned; Crawford's earlier band The Cab were a fellow Las Vegas group of day one Panic! fans who got their start by passing demos to Spencer Smith during a Panic! show and released their debut album under Decaydance before going forward independently, and Weekes's earlier Utah-based indie band The Brobecks had an expansive discography (and had even opened for Fall Out Boy in the past). Weekes in particular was an extremely strong songwriter with a huge backlog of Brobecks demos he could potentially utilize for Panic!'s discography, as he'd grown frustrated with music as a career after The Brobecks seemingly stalled out. The audition itself was somewhat botched by Panic!'s management, who sent Weekes only three songs to learn instead of fifteen, but he made the cut nonetheless.

However, this was a familiar pattern; like their predecessor in Jon Walker, both Crawford and Weekes were brought in as touring members only; Smith and Urie did most of the instrumentation and composition, and Urie was keen to play as many instruments as possible in the studio while making the band's third record.

Things started slow at first. "New Perspective" was the first song released under this new incarnation of Panic!, but it wasn't tied to any album outside of the soundtrack to the Jennifer's Body film. They needed a proper follow-up album that could prove that they were worth sticking around for now that half the band was gone. Prior to the split, Ross and Urie had mostly shared the spotlight in terms of media publicity. Ross was the moody, introspective composer and lyricist with a love for classic literature, more than a shade pretentious and somewhat withdrawn. By contrast, Urie was the showboating, magnetic personality with powerful pipes that ran counterpoint to that. But now Urie had to be both the compelling showman and the creative powerhouse, and embracing this role fully would take time.

The band set the stage with a bizarre short film, "The Overture," in an effort to cement the new halved version of Panic! at the Disco. The film has an emphasis on letting go of baggage, and it concludes with an exchange between the two remaining members of the band. "I guess it's just us, then," says Urie to Smith, to which Smith replies somberly, "it always has been." The metaphor was fairly obvious. This made quite a few fans anxious and even upset, as though Panic! was trying to subtly rewrite history and revise it so that Ross and Walker were never part of the band. Put a pin in that. We'll get to that.

The two remaining members of Panic! might have had a complete lineup at this point, but they were struggling to get an album to coalesce for the fans that still stuck around. While they had plans to record a third album in 2009 and get it out by early 2010, work on this stalled out. With two missing members in the studio, the writing process was tremendously different and more challenging, and Urie confessed that it felt "confused" at times.

The band somewhat nervously partnered up with producers John Feldmann and Butch Walker, and even worked some with Rob Mathes, their producer on Pretty (who also helped with The Young Veins' debut). Urie admitted to struggling with the record's lyricism, seeing as that was Ross's area. For assistance, the band once again turned to Pete Wentz. With Fall Out Boy on hiatus and its future uncertain, Wentz contributed lyrics to the production of Panic!'s third album and assisted Smith and Urie with songwriting. And since Panic! still had the rights to whatever songs the full band had written prior to the split, Urie and Smith could also retool earlier material written by members who were no longer in the band. For the new era's aesthetic, new bassist Dallon Weekes stepped in to help conceptualize the album's art and presentation.

"The Ballad of Mona Lisa," the lead single for promote Panic! at the Disco's third album, was released February of 2011. The song was drafted years ago, long before the split, and was meant to represent a new beginning even though, sonically, it was undeniably much closer in sound to Fever than it was to Pretty. For fans who missed the sound of the band's starting days, this was a welcome shift. It helped that the music video seemed like an intentional throwback to the very same (and even had the same director), though the circus-fueled ecstasy was replaced with a pseudo-steampunk aesthetic. The song got generally good critical reception, though it didn't reach the same heights as its preceding singles.

Come March 2011, about two years after the split and even longer since Pretty. Odd., Panic! at the Disco released Vices & Virtues. As the name implies, the record's subject material largely dealt with themes of manipulation and sin. And again, it overall felt closer to Fever in sound than it did to Pretty, a stylistic choice that was intentional on Urie and Smith's parts. To fill the void left behind by their missing bassist and guitarist, Urie embraced multi-instrumentation, and played as many instruments on Vices as he could. It boasted a polished, sleek synth-pop sound, though keen-eared listeners could pick up on the places where Ross's writing influence held strong. Most obvious of these was the track "Nearly Witches," which was a recycled Cricket & Clover track that once debuted in demo form on a collaborative Decaydance mixtape in late 2008. The final track retained some of Ross's melodic and compositional touches, though the chorus and most of the lyrics of the verses had been altered drastically.

The album received generally positive if mixed reviews. Critics naturally picked up on the band's shortcomings in the wake of the split, and were critical of the composition and lyricism in comparison to the band's earlier works, but welcomed the more diverse instrumentation. For fans...well, many were still pretty bitter over the split. Those in the pro-Urie camp were pleased to hear what they saw as a return to form, while those in the pro-Ross camp criticized the lyricism, as it largely lacked what they loved so much about Fever's tangled literary metaphors and Pretty's confident nonsense. And, of course, unavoidably, some of the songs on Vices were about the split (most notably "The Calendar"). But in part and parcel of returning to Fever's general aesthetic, Panic! once again embraced the over-the-top theatricality of their origins, with steampunk-inspired costuming and pomp at live shows to go along with the new sound, though it was all significantly less scripted.

While Vices & Virtues didn't perform as well as past records, it kept Panic! in the conversation as the band moved from a staple of the aughts to charting new waters in the 2010s. Unfortunately, that whole paradigm shift I mentioned earlier was still going on - emo was very much on a decline, and while fans who stuck around after the split liked the return to the Fever-esque theatrics, Vices didn't hit the same heights that Fever did. The theatrics of emo were falling out of favor, and Vices couldn't quite recapture that magic.

There were rumbles amidst the fanbase while this was all going on, too. Even people who chose to follow the continuation of Panic!'s career voiced uncertainty as to the...well, morality of Smith and Urie keeping the name, contract, and social capital. And, most pointedly, the morality of Smith and Urie continuing to perform the songs Ross wrote about a troubled, abusive home life, now divorced from the man who wrote them. Songs like "Camisado" would continue to be performed live, which was concerning to some fans when Ross explicitly noted that those songs were deeply personal, so personal that he grew uncomfortable with spilling his life into music like that and changed the way he wrote lyrics entirely because of it.

But 2012 saw another hitch in the pattern once the Vices & Virtues touring cycle was complete. In what had come to be a pattern, touring guitarist Ian Crawford departed from the band, citing that he wanted to make "real, genuine music. I don't wanna get rich or die trying."

So that was a good sign!

With the lineup shift, Smith and Urie hired Kenneth Harris (guitar) as a replacement for Crawford. Like Crawford, Harris was not involved in the creative process, and was relegated to touring member only. However, Weekes confirmed in 2012 on Twitter that he was involved with Panic! as a permanent member, and he was contributing creatively in the studio.

This was around the time that fandom had made much of its migration from the forums of Livejournal to the wild west of Tumblr in earnest, and it was at this point that the term "Emo Trinity" became ingrained into bandom lexicon. It was also not uncommon, from this point onward, to see people listing Ryan Ross as someone to be content warned for or blacklisted on Tumblr, even if after hiatusing The Young Veins, he had released very little music under his own name. The reasoning behind this was...well, there were a lot of layers to this. One of those being that Ross was seen as the "instigator" of the split in certain subsections of the fandom, and so he was subsequently blamed for it, particularly from those who sided with the Urie-Smith axis. The Ryden shippers and tinhatters had their own theories about the alleged relationship between Ross and Urie, and there was a prevailing idea that the relationship was somehow unhealthy, abusive, or toxic, with Ross as the wrongful party. Animosity flourished throughout that subsection of bandom, leading to rumors of a very nasty sort, and not very many of them with much merit: that Ryan Ross as a deeply unpleasant person, that he abused his dog, that he'd fallen into drug habits, that he had some problematic girlfriends, and other such unsavory details.

The important part here is that while certainly Ross still had his supporters, and there were people who could like both the Ross-Walker axis and the Urie-Smith one, there was a general sense of animosity aimed at Ross (more so than Walker), and the way he receded from the spotlight had made him easy to villainize. Fans could project whatever narrative they wanted onto the negative space he left behind, even if Urie was generally very cordial in speaking about him, and claimed they were still talking as of 2013.

And Panic! wasn't going away anytime soon. Vices & Virtues did well, but the band wanted to do better, especially if they wanted to edge their way out from under the shadow that the split had cast over them and persisted even years after. Fortunately, by 2013, things were going to start moving in a definitively positive direction for them, and it would come from a familiar place.

In early 2013, Fall Out Boy reunited, taking everyone by surprise, and released their first single in about four years. They announced a new album and tour, and among the supporting acts for their big return tour was none other than their protégés, Panic! at the Disco. And My Chemical Romance was busy breaking up in the background, so it wasn't perfect, but for the first time in years, two-thirds of the "Emo Trinity" were actually picking up momentum again. Fall Out Boy's reunion not only catapulted Panic! back into the limelight, but it did wonders for their PR as well - which was good, because this was around the time that Smith, Urie, and Weekes had finished the band's fourth studio album: Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die!

The record saw another sonic shift, landing more firmly in the pop landscape and shedding any and all of the more baroque-styled emo leanings that persisted in Vices. The band recorded it as a trio with Butch Walker (who'd worked on them earlier on Vices), and the album came together easier than its predecessor. Most of its lyrical content dealt with Las Vegas - its party scene, the gambling, the clubbing, all the highs and the lows. And overall, the album performed very well, and its fan reception was largely positive, though of course, a hefty portion of the fanbase lamented the loss of the layered lyricism of the early days of Panic!, and many swore off Too Weird entirely because of the dance-pop emphasis. Lead single "Miss Jackson" (which featured Fueled By Ramen labelmate LOLO, one of the few featured artists on a Panic! song to date) got a huge amount of traction, as did accompanying singles like "This Is Gospel" and "Nicotine.

More controversial was the track "Girls/Girls/Boys," which Urie alleged was written about a threesome he had with two girls. However, there were a lot of fans who also saw this track as a celebration of bisexuality or pansexuality, and reclaimed it as a sort of pride anthem - at live concerts, fans worked to shine colorful hearts in patterns to form a rainbow, and eventually the screens behind the band would start depicting rainbows and featuring openly gay celebrities as if in response to this. On the whole, still a net positive...at the time. Put a pin in that one too. We'll get to that one.

For the bulk of Too Weird, Weekes took a very active role in songwriting, contributing to all but two of the tracks on the finished product and drawing from his reserve of demos from his days with The Brobecks (the original Brobecks demo for "Far Too Young to Die" can still be found floating around on the internet to this day). The Urie-Smith-Weekes combination formed a strong songwriter trifecta, particularly if critical and fan reception was any indication. The album did well, and fans loved the singles. Panic! was living in the spotlight once more. But this, like so many things for Panic! at the Disco, would not last.

Just before embarking on a headlining tour to support Too Weird, Smith disclosed to the fanbase he'd been undergoing a long struggle with alcohol and substance abuse that had plagued him since the days of Pretty. Odd. Thus, Spencer Smith would be departing from Panic! in order to resolve his ongoing health issues. Smith joined the band for a scattering of dates early in the tour, but eventually made his departure from the band's touring lineup mid-2013.

Fans were gutted, but at least this time, everything was amicable, or at least had the public performance of it. Smith departed from the ranks of Panic! willingly for the sake of his personal health, and it was clear that this had a profound effect on the remaining members of the band. "This Is Gospel," arguably one of the band's biggest singles and certainly the biggest off of Too Weird, is said to have been written about Smith's struggles with addiction and culminates with the line: "if you love me, let me go."

By 2015, Smith announced a formal departure from the band entirely, which didn't really come as a shock considering that he was only a member in name at this point. This reduced the band's creative lineup solely to Urie and Weekes. To replace Smith, the band enlisted Dan Pawlovich (drums), who was primarily known as the drummer for the pop-punk band Valencia, but he would not be promoted to creative contributor in Smith's place.

And, as it happens, neither would anyone else.

The name of Panic! at the Disco was well and truly in the public eye again. Too Weird had performed well enough for the band to enjoy comfortable mainstream success once more, lineup changes notwithstanding. And while at this point, certainly there were fans raising their eyebrows at Urie hanging onto the Panic! name despite being the only original member left, it wasn't totally fair to act like this was a one-man show. He still had Weekes contributing creatively in the studio, so it's not like Panic! was entirely a solo effort.

That is, until it came to light that Weekes had gone back to touring member only, and would no longer be contributing in the studio, an announcement that happened very quietly in the midst of the shower of publicity for what would become Panic!'s fifth studio album. The justification of this wasn't ever really disclosed, save for Urie saying that things weren't really "working out" creatively, and calling this an "oversight." So, in short, Urie was now essentially the only member of the band with any creative control whatsoever, turning Panic! at the Disco into "basically a solo project" - and one that Urie had no intention of relinquishing. Not when he loved the name, the fame, and the fans this much. Uh-oh!

I mean, uh, hey guys, check out the new Panic! at the Disco single for their upcoming album, Death of a Bachelor! It's got showmanship, it's got pomp, it's got verve. It's performing pretty well! Look at those chart-topping singles! And Brendon Urie did it all by himself and played every instrument except for the horns, isn't that something? I mean, he had a team of writers and composers working with him, and he was working with producer Jake Sinclair for pretty much all of it, but it's like, look how talented this guy is, doing this whole album by himself! Wow!

It was a narrative that managed to hold things together, for a time. For all the fractures that had split away the legacy of Panic! at the Disco, piece by piece, member by member, it seemed that Urie himself was untouchable. He was the frontman, after all, and without his voice, surely there could be no Panic! He managed to keep the legacy of the band sustained when no one else could. Bachelor's lyricism was perhaps reflective of this, dwelling on themes of reinvention and coming to terms with oneself. The album itself got a lot of accolades, and has been certified double platinum since its debut. And for the most part, fan reception was positive too.

Everything was coming up Urie. And while certainly there were still those bitter over the split, the Ryan Ross fans were very much a minority at this point - and the fact that Ross had mostly receded from the spotlight by this point didn't help. In the wider culture of bandom, Brendon Urie could do no wrong. He'd come into his own since the days of A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. He'd gone from oddball Morman kid who nearly broke down from stress after the band secured its first record deal - intending to run away to Arizona to become a hairdresser, of all things, until Spencer Smith talked him down - to a showy, flashy performer of his own right. His stage persona was very much that of someone who reveled in the attention, and admitted shamelessly to this being the case. Fandom perception of him generally molded itself to that archetype: cocky, loud, a bit of an asshole, but ultimately a lovable one. And he was a solo powerhouse and talented enough to uphold the legacy of the band all on his own on top of it.

He could do a whole lot more than that, in fact.

So Death of a Bachelor was hugely successful. You know what was also popping off at this point in time? Broadway. This was late 2016 and early 2017, so not only did you have the Hamilton craze sweeping the nation by storm, you had huge, extremely online fanbases revolving around musical theater. Theater kids had never been so prominent, so fervent, and so annoying. And there was, perhaps, no more perfect an intersection between musical theater buffs and extremely online emo kids than the casting of Brendon Urie as the one of the leads in the 2017 run of Kinky Boots.

Following the conclusion of the tour to support Death of a Bachelor, Urie got the rest of 2017 off from the label so he could perform a ten-week stint as Charlie Price in Kinky Boots. This cemented his status as a multi-talented pearlescent star - an established singer of a famous pop band who could also act and do theater? The narrative here in the popular media and in most bandom circles online revolved around how ultra-talented this single guy was. It's hard to exaggerate how much good will Urie had built up over the years - it was really only the still-bitter camps of Ross's supporters who continued to write him off at this point, because they'd never really stopped doing so since 2009 (made even more absurd by the fact that these fans, inarguably, had more of an online presence than Ross himself).

So in the general sense? Urie could do no wrong. Anything that could have possibly been seen as a red flag was disregarded and swept aside. When Weekes announced in late 2017 he would be departing from the band entirely, this was treated as...sad, but not the end of the world. Both Weekes and Urie claimed that the separation was amicable, seeing as Weekes wanted to focus on his own band independent from Panic! - I Don't Know How But They Found Me (often abbreviated as "IDKHOW"). Panic! brought on a new touring bassist, Nicole Row (bass), who has been to date the only female member of the band (though she, too, was relegated to touring and performing only, and would not be contributing in the studio).

This came in conjunction with the announcement of Panic!'s sixth studio album, Pray for the Wicked. This took fans off guard, as most hadn't been expecting any new material so soon after Urie's time on Broadway. Any potential bad PR about Weekes's departure was quickly smothered by the hype generated by a new Panic! album so soon after the last one. The album's first single, "Say Amen (Saturday Night)" performed extremely well, increasing the band's publicity even further. The album performed well too, and got generally positive reviews, with critics praising the way Urie had incorporated his experience on Broadway into the album. Again, he was the sole creative credit behind this album...though he had quite a team of writers behind him. Somewhere north of forty, in fact.

Even whispers and accusations of serious misdemeanors couldn't taint Panic!'s upward trajectory; when touring guitarist Kenneth Harris was exposed as a sexual predator, using his status within the band to access underage fans, he was fired and replaced less than twenty-four hours after these allegations surfaced. This snag only further elevated Panic!'s good PR as evidence of how much Urie clearly wanted to protect the fans. Never mind that the band said nothing about why Harris was being so abruptly evicted, only stating that he would no longer be performing with them. Harris was swiftly replaced by Mike Naran (guitar), who was most known as the former guitarist of Sparks the Rescue. Again, like everyone else inducted into the band at this point, none of these members would be contributing in the studio; Urie had full creative control over the band's material, alongside any other songwriters or producers he wanted to work with.

And at first this narrative worked. But it only takes the smallest application of pressure to make such a tall tower topple. And for Panic! at the Disco, this pressure came in the form of the second single released to promote Pray for the Wicked. The straw that broke the camel's back had arrived in the form of "High Hopes."

"High Hopes" was released in late May of 2018, and it quickly took off. The official music video raked in millions of views, and the radio airplay skyrocketed. You couldn't take a twenty-minute trip to the grocery store without hearing it. It charted high, and it charted consistently, and that's when it happened.

People got sick of it. People got so, so incredibly sick of it.

People hated "High Hopes." Bandom, at large, detested "High Hopes." All but the most dedicated fans loathed it. Many cited it as overly repetitive and annoying, and overplayed all to hell, which sapped away any charm it might have had (and a 2020 Rolling Stone article revealed that "High Hopes" was one of many tracks that had been illegally and artificially pushed for radio via pay-for-play tactics). Even former Panic! members took note of its ubiquity. And then "High Hopes" overtook Panic!'s crowning single from their very first album, "I Write Sins Not Tragedies," on streaming services...

It seemed to hit people slowly, then all at once, just how much had changed between Panic!'s very first single and their latest hit. When Pray for the Wicked was released in June 2018, the band still had enough social capital for people to give it a listen. Many even liked it! Panic! and Urie were bigger than ever, collaborating with huge names like Taylor Swift and Juice WRLD, which cemented them as household names in their own right. And critically, the album got decent enough reviews. But then, the longer "High Hopes" pervaded, the more bitter the outlook on the record became. Its chief decriers criticized it for being chock-full of shallow anthems about partying with very little sonic variation, especially lampooning the lyricism. Even the slowest, most meditative track on the album, the closing "Dying in L.A.," was met with unimpressed comments that it really just sounded like an attempt to recapture the mood of the stripped-down piano version of "This is Gospel," from five years earlier. Pray for the Wicked took the band to new heights in terms of mainstream success, but in doing so, it seems it had alienated a huge part of the band's core fanbase.

Critiques of the changing of Panic!'s creative direction had been floating around since Fever. They increased in intensity and outrage after the split, but after Too Weird performed extremely well, the bolstered fanbase was large enough to drown out the naysayers. But Pray for the Wicked, and "High Hopes" in particular, shattered the rose-tinted glasses after "High Hopes" outstripped what most modern fans would call one of the best emo anthems of the mid-aughts in "I Write Sins." All of this was, arguably, only fuel to a rapidly growing fire that had, in truth, been lit years ago and was only finally coming to a boil.

Urie's charisma and showmanship was no longer enough to carry past the true, earnest killer of any fanbase: irritation. For some, it was the annoyance at this one overplayed song that escalated to writing off the entire album, and then the album preceding it, Death of a Bachelor. For others, it was a slow-burning annoyance and resentment that had built up over the course of nine years of shed band members and old legacies. The one-man-show narrative of Panic! at the Disco was fraying and falling apart in real time as the fanbase, in a fit of absolute aggravation over this one single overplayed song, looked at one another and asked themselves if it was ever a one-man-show, really? Was it charisma that truly carried Urie this far...or ego?

Bandom was undergoing a shift. Slowly, inexorably, Panic! at the Disco was being written out of bandom history. One of the main players of the Emo Trinity, and the only one actively touring at the time (My Chemical Romance had been broken up for six years at this point and Fall Out Boy had just finished touring their 2018 release Mania and were due to take a break), and suddenly...no one wanted anything to do with them. Or rather, him. Brendon Urie had become everyone's least favorite member of Panic! at the Disco despite being the only one still in it. People were picking up their old Panic! records and reminiscing over how good they used to be, back when they were a band, and not solely one person.

I can't stress enough how much Urie had already lost a great deal of good will simply by sheer annoyance within the greater circles of bandom. The rate of fanworks slowed dramatically. Tumblr gifsets featuring Urie accrued mere handfuls of notes where they once hit the thousands. More and more emphasis was put on the good old days of Panic! at the Disco, and fond, nostalgic rhapsodizing about the lyrical and creative genius of Ryan Ross. Even when Urie formally came out as pansexual in 2019, the mild celebration this garnered in the press wasn't enough to salvage what was going to become a rapid downslide.

Panic! at the Disco was being eroded from bandom history, where it once had been one of the three great pillars holding everything up.

And things were only going to get worse.

By 2019, the Pray for the Wicked tour had wrapped up, and Urie was on the record saying he was certain that there would be a new Panic! album soon, since he could never stop writing. Then in 2020, this little thing happened called a global pandemic? Maybe you heard about it. But it ground just about everything to halt for a good long while, and it was in the midst of lockdowns and quarantines that one particular kernel of discourse managed to dislodge itself from years of dismissal and bury itself squarely in the center of everyone's discussion surrounding Panic! at the Disco. Panic! wasn't doing anything at the moment, courtesy of said global pandemic, and the fanbase at large was disgruntled over the way the success of Pray for the Wicked and "High Hopes" in particular had drowned out everything else they still liked about the band.

In truth, this storm had been coming for a long while now, but it was only now that people were willing to listen. "High Hopes" had burned up whatever social capital the band still had, and all anyone needed to write them off entirely was a really, really good reason. Maybe even a moral outrage?

It started with fans sharing stories with one another about Panic! meet and greets, and then the stories started to spread. Most of this took place on Twitter, in wholly public forums, and before you know it, it turned out a whole lot of people had less than stellar stories to share about Panic! at the Disco - to be more specific, their management.

Zach Cloud Hall was Panic's head security and bodyguard, and unlike just about every other member of the band, had actually been with Panic! since almost their earliest days and stayed there. He had, by being very active on Twitter and being present to mediate meet and greets with Urie, accrued a lot of sway with Panic!'s fanbase overall. He was extremely close with Brendon Urie, to the point where they were in each other's "bubbles" during quarantine.

He also had a whole laundry list of misdemeanors under his belt. It wasn't just general unpleasantness and threats of physical violence with fans at Panic! shows; it was also sexual misconduct with underage fans, harassment of fans, and a whole lot else, the most detestable being allegations of sexual assault of a minor. The more discussion swarmed around his topic, the deeper it went. Not only did Hall have a history of truly despicable behavior toward Panic!'s underage and vulnerable fanbase, but he had a legitimate criminal record that reached all the way back to the early nineties and up to 2006 - right around the time that Hall entered Panic!'s employ.

Fans weren't the only ones pissed. As the hashtag #FireZackHall began to pick up traction on Twitter and compilations of his behavior were assembled, this prompted other former members of the band to speak out. Former bassist Dallon Weekes had up until this point largely been fairly cagey as to his prior relationship with Panic! at the Disco. He had largely spoken of it in vague, neutral terms or not at all, and the most fans had to latch onto were potential lyrical references to his time spent with Panic! in his current works with IDKHOW. As more of the ugly truth came to light, Weekes was more blunt about how he considered Hall to be one of the worst people he'd ever met. To this day Weekes has mostly avoided naming names, but he does not speak fondly of his time spent in Panic! at the Disco (though he has edited old pictures to emphasize that he wasn't entirely happy there).

Weekes' wife, Breezy Weekes, was less vague. She confirmed what other fans had circulated about Hall's behavior and claimed that Hall actively harassed both her and her husband, but was fearful that speaking about it publicly might cause her husband to lose his job, and despite going to Panic!'s management about it, that they saw no demonstrable change in behavior. She also insinuated that both Urie and his wife were complicit and participatory in this harassment both in large and small strokes, but stated that she and her husband both signed NDAs and legally could not say much about it. There were suggestions that Weekes was also severely underpaid during his time with the band, which was consistent with a running fandom in-joke that Dallon Weekes had to keep up a second job at McDonald's because of that tyrant Brendon Urie. This joke became less funny when Weekes did indeed end up disclosing that he had a second job cleaning carpets (which he absolutely detested) during his time with Panic! The reporting on this anecdote painted an amusing picture at first, but in hindsight many found it unsettling - why was a guy playing to thousands of fans of such a massive band having to clean carpets on the side to support his family? And looking back at old Livejournal posts and anecdotes he shared on Twitter and Instagram...why did he have to take so many horrible odd jobs and such, anyway?

The hardcore fans claimed this was just a bitter parting shot, but Weekes wasn't the only former bandmember to speak up. Former guitarist Ian Crawford also took to Twitter to confirm the speculations as to Zach Hall's gross mistreatment of people both in and outside of the band, citing Hall's behavior as one of the primary reasons that Crawford left Panic!, and that both he and his sister had seen enough of Hall's behavior to believe that all the allegations were completely true.

Things escalated further. Urie was surely complicit in this awful behavior, but was he himself also a predator? The answer to that one was far less clear cut. Several fans came forward with stories of Urie acting lecherous around them while they were underage, but these stories were quickly deleted under a deluge of claims that some of these accusations were actually stolen from Wattpad fanfictions. Some could look back at the (now infamous) article wherein Urie discussed his pansexuality and also his approach to stage gay with Ryan Ross pre-split, and drew attention to how Urie recalled that Ross didn't want to be fondled and kissed on stage despite Urie persisting. Others chronicled evidence of Urie's less savory moments, such as making tasteless rape jokes, dropping racial slurs, or making misogynistic remarks at concerts. These were less damning and concrete compared to the allegations against Hall, but most could conclude that Urie had enabled or at the very least done nothing to stop Hall's behavior for years on end.

And...okay, here's the part where we have to talk about Chelsey Lynn. Back in 2012 and 2013, one particular fan had such a fixation on Panic! at the Disco that she obsessively stalked the frontman and former band members. This fan catfished and gaslit Ryan Ross for months, pretending to be Brendon Urie making amends. She went as far as to invite Ross to Urie's wedding. After Ross found out about the deception, he was understandably furious, and while Urie mentioned reaching out to Ross after the smoke cleared, he never got a response from him.

Lynn basically got off scot-free by way of a written apology and a promise never to contact any of the affected parties (Ross, Urie, and Urie's wife) again. And that seemed to be the end of it. All the affected parties were evidently content with this, and Urie's wife seemed to take a "live and let live" approach...and then followed Lynn on Instagram. Lynn continued her obsessive documentation of the Uries - their house, their phone numbers, family members, and whatever else she could access. She ran some very popular Tumblr blogs and YouTube channels featuring compilations of livestreams and short-form videos Urie made on the now-defunct Vine app, and continued to attend meet and greets to speak with him.

This last part is harder to verify, since so much of this information was deleted in a storm of controversy. But allegedly, not only was Lynn using fake Instagram/Facebook accounts to catfish Ross, but she was also using those accounts to solicit (again, mostly underage) fans for nudes, among other things. All this is to explain the sheer difficulty in ascertaining how much of the allegations against Urie were actually allegations against Lynn, pretending to be Urie. This was, and remains, incredibly unclear. But it is clear that Lynn was not sufficiently dissuaded in engaging in her behavior, and the consequences were starting to flower out beyond more than just one super-fan. This is one of the reasons that the various allegations against Urie regarding sexual misconduct were so hard to verify - but the allegations against Hall seemed pretty cut and dry.

It took Urie four months to respond to the allegations against Hall and himself. His response involved a voiceover statement streamed on his Twitch account (with the chat set to subscribers only). He apologized and said that Hall's behavior was unacceptable and he would be removed from his position with Panic! at the Disco. But Urie also made it abundantly clear that he and Hall would remain close friends and he couldn't simply cut him out of his life. He also refuted any claims of unseemly acts as to his own character and wrote them off as untrue.

The entire apology took about three minutes. Urie told everyone to "stay dope" and signed off.

The tension had broken. Fans had their answer.

What had started as a steady erosion of Panic! at the Disco from the tenets of bandom history came as a deluge overnight. Edit blogs quietly rebranded. Active Tumblr URLs featuring Brendon Urie or Panic! at the Disco were deleted and replaced. DNIs were posted. Fanfic writers slapped disclaimers about a general disapproval for Urie's behavior and, in many cases, opted to write him out of their fics or simply replace him with someone else entirely. Where Ryan Ross had once been a nigh-universally blacklisted name and face in bandom, Brendon Urie seamlessly took his place. In any and all instances where an acknowledgement of Panic! at the Disco was required, it took place through the avenue of Ryan Ross instead; Ross's contributions to Panic!'s legacy were venerated, and Urie's were downplayed. The Wikipedia pages for Brendon Urie and Panic! at the Disco were quickly locked from editing after one too many fans took umbrage with the latter being described as Urie's solo project, and they would remain locked for years to prevent brigading. Urie had become bandom's number one pariah - and where he hadn't, he'd become someone it was now acceptable to point and laugh at (multiple times during the pandemic, his name would start trending purely so people could semi-jokingly blame him for various problems, including said pandemic).

In short? No one liked this apology. With its short length, long response time, the apology being effectively monetized with the chat set to subscribers only, and Urie's insistence that he and Hall remain friends (something he could have simply chosen not to mention), it came across as painfully naive if you were giving Urie the benefit of the doubt, and painfully insincere if you weren't. The vagueness of the statement also set off alarm bells; after all, just because Hall had been removed from his current position within the band didn't mean he wouldn't be occupying a different one from here on out. And after the speed and alacrity with which Harris was removed for similar allegations after much less campaigning (and without the band ever issuing an official statement regarding his behavior), the fact that it took Urie four months to respond in any way retroactively cast that particular event in a darker light. Why wasn't management up front about why Harris was fired at the time? Was Harris really speedily fired after his inappropriate behavior came to light? Or had Panic!'s management already been aware of his behavior, and were simply choosing not to take action unless it went public - thereby giving them an excellent opportunity for some good PR by acting quickly?

For many fans, this was a miserable wake-up call. And for the pre-split fans who had been awaiting this day...well, they could say they were on the right side of history after all. Brendon Urie's fall from grace had reset the stage, and people were willing to read into things that they might have once written off.

Maybe it was a little fucked up, actually, that Urie kept the Panic! name after all the original members had left, and it was a little messed up that he'd often get referred to as its founder in the 2020s. Maybe it was kind of not okay that Urie kept performing songs about Ross's personal life long after the man himself had left the band. Maybe Urie was complicit in enabling the substance abuse and alcoholism that led to Smith's health problems and subsequent departure from the band. Maybe Brendon Urie had badly mistreated and underpaid Dallon Weekes and appropriated personal songs - songs that Weekes initially wrote for his wife coming to terms with her pansexuality - so he could make them about this cool threesome he once had instead. Maybe it was a little suspicious that Urie got all the credit for "This Is Gospel" being about his bandmate's departure, when Weekes wrote an awful lot of that song. Maybe Brendon Urie had enabled a horribly toxic workplace in the form of his friendship with Zach Hall.

Maybe Panic! at the Disco had a habit of rewriting its own history, whenever it got to be too inconvenient.

And maybe he wasn't the one-man-show after all. Where once his flaws could have been written off, now they felt all too obvious. Urie's voice, his most distinctive quality, was cracking at the edges after years upon years of hard partying and substance use, and it showed. He could hit repetitive high notes at concerts, but what good did that do if he couldn't imbue them with the requisite emotion? He could carry a tune and bring bombast to performances, but what about the quieter moments? Was he really such a one-man-show, if he needed a crew of some fifty-odd writers to draft all his songs for him? And could his lyricism, packed to the gills with banter about parties and one-night stands and hangovers, really hold a candle to the cunning assonance of Weekes, the layered metaphors of Wentz, the darkly spun poeticism of Ross? The original split may have been driven by creative differences, but what does it say that almost none of the original members have so much as been in the same room together since it happened?

The paradigm shift had happened, and Panic! at the Disco went dark on all social media. And for many, the hope was that it would stay that way.

But alas, it wouldn't.

A lot happened in the intervening years. Back in 2019, Fall Out Boy announced a triple-headlining tour with fellow pop-punk giants Green Day and Weezer (this was postponed to 2021 due to COVID). Not long after, My Chemical Romance announced a surprise reunion, and managed to perform one single show in December before the world closed into total lockdown. This was before the Panic! ship had really sunk, and at that point people were just kind of stoked that all three players of the Emo Trinity were active again since 2009. But by the time 2022 rolled around and everyone could play shows again, the world was seeing a massive upswell in the emo movement of the early aughts. Paramore was back too, and there was this massive festival that was looking to capitalize on the fact that emo was cool again, bringing in a ton of old and new names that popularized the movement.

And in the midst of all this positive press surrounding the upswing in nostalgia for the early aughts, Panic!'s social media accounts lit up again in May of 2022 to tease a new single and album. And seeing as there was a leak in October 2021 via Rivers Cuomo's personal Discord server that Jake Sinclair was producing another Panic! album, it seems that this material had been on the docket for a while.

Fan reaction was swift, immediate, and brutal. The break hadn't allowed things to die down at all; it had instead allowed things to fester, and all the kids had a new old emo band to obsess about in the form of My Chemical Romance. Paramore was teasing new music again, and Fall Out Boy had just finished up that triple-headlining tour. Nobody particularly needed or was asking for new music from Brendon at the Disco anymore, said the broader circles of bandom. Sure, there were some diehard fans who refused to let this spoil their fun, and a lot of casual fans who didn't know why and how Panic! had become so uncool these days. But by and large, the reception for the seventh studio album to be released under the name of Panic! at the Disco was tepid at best.

Panic!'s seventh studio album, Viva Las Vengeance, released on August 19th, 2022. Its first single, the title track, was released on June 1st, 2022. Between June 1st and August 19th, the band released five singles to promote it in rapid succession, followed by two additional singles not long after its release. With nearly twelve tracks on the complete album, this meant that they fired off nearly half of the tracklist in the span of about two months before the record was out.

And fans weren't exactly going wild over what they heard.

The album received generally positive reviews from critics, though many noted that the album was devoid of any genuine depth or mystique that Panic! was once applauded for. (For my part, all I can say is that the botched grammar wasn't very Hispanic at the Disco of him.) But with all of Panic!'s associated Wikipedia pages locked up tight, very little could be gleaned about the album's reception outside of vaguely positive quotes from reviews, unless you knew what to look for. Critical reviews toward the album had nice things to say about Urie's showmanship and vocals, but all save for the most dedicated contingents of hardcore fans seemed to either utterly loathe or be outright indifferent to it. It was the polar opposite of A Fever You Can't Sweat Out.

All told, it performed rather poorly, and reviews were more mixed than the Wikipedia summaries let on. At the time of this writing, the music video for the album's title track sits at under 8 million views, with steadily declining views down to the last music video released for Viva Las Vengeance, "Do It to Death," which hasn't even hit 500k (to contrast: the lowest performing video for Pray for the Wicked was for "Say Amen (Saturday Night)," at 53 million). After the wild, over-the-top success of the last album cycle, maybe this was to be expected. Viva's subject matter - a love letter to Las Vegas, where Urie grew up, with discussions of fame and burnout and longing - didn't help. This was ground he'd already covered before in past releases, like Too Weird. When people held up the new songs compared to the way they idealized those old tracks from Fever, they professed them to be shallow at best. A great deal of fan outrage congregated around the track "Local God" in particular, with many interpreting the lyrics as being blatantly about Ryan Ross, a man who hadn't released music in something like a decade, and to them it seemed incredibly petty and...well, mean.

More damning was the turnout for the tour to support the album, which saw a number of logistical mishaps, including multiple parts of the stage and speakers very visibly catching fire multiple times. Ticket sales didn't look to be doing so well either, with prices dipping down to as low as $17-20 USD in some cases. Some people reported getting advertisements that inexplicably bundled Panic! tickets at a discount with tickets to see...hockey games? While Panic!'s management would cite logistical issues preventing them from making their Canadian dates, some theorized that this was due to extremely low ticket sales not justifying the expense of taking the tour over the border, based on what seats were still available at a look. And on top of all that, casual fans seeking to take advantage of the low prices to maybe see a band they once liked perform some of their favorite singles were horribly out of luck; Panic! had made the questionable decision to play the entirety of Viva Las Vengeance front to back, bookending it with a smattering of hits from older albums. This is notable because Urie himself once said that it was important to never play too many new songs at shows, because you risk the artist's show becoming "masturbatory." And yet, on this tour, "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" and "Nine in the Afternoon" were the sole pre-split tracks audiences got to hear.

Worst of all, eagle-eyed fans quickly picked out the presence of Zach Hall behind the scenes and backstage on some of the touring members' instagram reels. Hardcore devotees insisted that Panic!'s team must have a good reason to still have him around, while others balked at the fact that, despite Urie's claims to the contrary, Hall might as well never have left.

It was a bizarre thing to watch. Former fans who knew the old songs and current fans who didn't know the new ones clustered together at barricades and in dead pits with identical expressions of bafflement as they realized they didn't know the words. Former fans would capture video footage of stage hazards as speakers caught fire, or would pan over motionless arenas to the sound of Urie's distinctive voice cracking at earsplitting intervals as he strained to hit repetitive high notes. Others pointed out that even on the studio versions, Urie's voice was starting to sound extremely strained, almost like he wasn't taking very much care of it at all. Stalwart fans insisted that Viva had some merit to it, and would be vindicated by history as a misunderstood gem in time, but they were very much a minority.

There was, for some, something of a fascinating tragedy in all of it. A band started by childhood friends and which became one of the staples of a movement they both loved had come to be something reviled by the people who once loved them the most, because the one remaining member of the original lineup continued to cling to the name even when everything else had fallen away. In the midst of a revolving door of past members who, for the most part, barely seem willing to acknowledge each other, if at all, the only remaining member seemed intent on blatantly ignoring and rewriting the band's history as he continued parading the songs that other people wrote, and profiting off of their pasts. Brendon Urie nonetheless got a tattoo to commemorate the tour, even as he paced the pews of dead arenas to perform an album that no one seemed to particularly like, save for him.

Remember that Tumblr post that coined the idea of the "Holy Trinity" of emo bands? Well, the OP of that post returned, nearly a decade later, to formally rescind Panic!'s place in the Trinity, taking everything full circle (the common sentiment I've seen voiced is that this spot really should have gone to Paramore in the first place anyway, and they've now effectively replaced Panic!'s original spot in many ways). Panic! at the Disco had always received some form of ridicule - they had a fanbase composed predominantly of teenage girls - but now the call was coming from inside the house. The voices that had once loved the band most ardently were now its most vocal naysayers.

After all, you have to love something a whole lot to be this angry about where it ended up.

So people were either sick of hearing about Brendon Urie or endlessly fascinated by watching this trainwreck happen, all while My Chemical Romance and Paramore were performing shows with massive turnouts, and also while Fall Out Boy was starting to issue cryptic teasers for an upcoming eighth studio album. And in the midst of all this, what should surface but an innocuous photo of Pete Wentz making something in his kitchen, the day after Christmas in 2022.

Or maybe not so innocuous. Because, as it happens, bandom has a long and proud tradition of being highly capable of identifying their favorite band boys via a mere handful of the crustiest pixels imaginable. And people quickly noticed there was a picture in Wentz's kitchen that looked an awful lot like Brendon Urie posing with his wife for a pregnancy announcement.

People lost their minds. The photo was quickly deleted, but the damage was done. After years of interviews claiming he didn't really want kids, Brendon Urie was now expecting? The flurry of posting reached a fever pitch until, but a month later, the tension broke once more.

Yes, Urie and his wife were expecting a kid. And, as he announced on January 24th, 2022, with the conclusion of the Viva Las Vengeance tour, Panic! at the Disco would be "no more."

And there was much rejoicing.

The internet went wild. The genuine mourning by the dedicated fans who still remained was quickly drowned out by everyone else's sheer ecstasy. Panic! quickly began trending on Twitter and Tumblr...and so did Ryan Ross, and Pete Wentz, and Fall Out Boy. The jokes immediately began circulating; famously, when Fall Out Boy returned from their hiatus in 2013, My Chemical Romance broke up not long after, hamstringing the Emo Trinity. And now, in 2023, after almost five years of no new music, Fall Out Boy was releasing an eighth studio album - and while My Chemical Romance was back, this time Panic! at the Disco was the one finishing up for good. To put it in perspective, the lead single for FOB's eighth album was released on January 18th, 2023. Panic! announced its breakup less than a week later, and the very next day FOB released a second single for their new record. The joke quickly became that Fall Out Boy had released a single so good that Urie just had to call it quits, right then and there.

It was a beautiful kind of serendipity. This was a band that started because Pete Wentz took notice of some kid's demos on Livejournal, and in a strange sort of way, it was Pete Wentz who became heavily associated with the band's inevitable end.

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. And hindsight has revealed quite a lot. In 2020, Adam Siska (bassist of The Academy Is...) acknowledged that Panic! at the Disco's sudden rise had a big part in how TAI never quite got their big break. That tour in 2006, where Panic! was supposed to be the support for TAI but more or less overtook them, ended up doing a lot of harm to TAI in the long run. Panic! radically altered the whole texture of the scene, and it never recovered from that. And late in 2006, Bloc Party opened for Panic! for all of three dates before the drummer got a collapsed lung and they had to withdraw, but the band didn't have very many nice things to say about Panic! then, either. Kerrang! magazine once asked Panic! at the Disco in their December 9, 2006 issue if the band, still a four-piece at the time, was worried about becoming "victims of their success." To this, Spencer Smith laughed: "As long as Brendon doesn't become an egotistical asshole and doesn't kill himself, then we'll be okay!"

While I can certainly say that I don't know any of these people personally, I will say that the dramatic irony of the band's history is tantamount to poetry. A Fever You Can't Sweat Out's commentary on fame and media and the effects of the industry on art take on a new, darker light when held up in contrast to the way Panic!'s legacy ended up. In so many parts of bandom, Panic! became a band defined by the absence of its members. Ryan Ross left the band in 2008 but continued to haunt its narrative right up until its dying breath. He and Urie's legacies remained tied to one another right until the last.

What truly killed Panic! at the Disco? Was it hubris and ego? The horrors of the industry? How responsible could one hold Brendon Urie for the way this story ended, despite him being the one to pull the trigger?

Maybe history will decide. After all, the only difference between martyrdom and suicide is press coverage.

And so we've reached the end. The abridged saga, as much of it as I could fit in one post. But as for the many members this band has had, I can resolve one final query: where are they now?

Brendon Urie will finally retire the name of Panic! at the Disco with the conclusion of the Viva Las Vengeance tour, and his Wikipedia page mostly remains immune to editing from brigading fans. He is accompanied by touring members Dan Pawlovich, Nicole Rowe, and Mike Naran.

Ryan Ross has not had an easy time of it since the split. He made numerous attempts to break back into music after The Young Veins hiatused but without much success. For a time he worked with Shane Morris as his manager, until it came to light that Morris was appropriating Ross's social media for fun and would at times delete songs from Ross's Soundcloud to prove to the fans that he wasn't "messing around." Even setting aside the obvious horror of being gaslit, catfished, and stalked by a fan for months on end, Ross has mostly shunned the spotlight. These days he mostly works with fellow musician and former girlfriend Z Berg (who now maintains most of his social media accounts) in the Dead End Kids Club, and makes semi-annual appearances performing with her. In 2019 he performed "Northern Downpour" with her for the first time in ten years and brought fans to tears.

Spencer Smith got married, got sober, and is living much more happily than he used to. When Decaydance rebranded as DCD2 in 2015, Smith helped label head Pete Wentz manage things, which technically made him Urie's boss. To date, he is the only former member of the band who is, at least publicly, on good terms with Urie, and still works at DCD2 today.

Brent Wilson reportedly became a window consultant guy. Most recently he got arrested in 2021 after cutting across three lanes in traffic without a turn signal, and subsequently tried for possession of a gun and a whole bunch of drugs.

Jon Walker has done a lot here and there in his solo career, and is one of the few members of the band to occasionally post about his time spent in it on social media, and to do so with either positivity or a heavy amount of irony virtually indistinguishable from positivity (I honestly can't tell which). Most recently as of this writing, he opened for a Riotfest 2022 show featuring reformed labelmates The Academy Is... and Midtown (headed by Gabe Saporta, of Decaydance labelmate Cobra Starship). Interestingly enough, this very same show was set to happen the same night as Panic!'s show in the same area to support Viva Las Vengeance; Panic! ended up canceling.

Ian Crawford is off working with a smattering of other musicians and making his own songs. In addition to his work with The Cab in the late aughts and 2010s, he also filled in as guitarist for The Academy Is... in their 10th anniversary tour, started a band called The Contestants, and as of 2018 has begun releasing his own solo material.

Dallon Weekes is fronting I Don't Know How But They Found Me along with former Falling in Reverse drummer Ryan Seaman (who might be the only other person in the scene who could claim to have had a worse former boss than Weekes). While he's been more open about the kind of...issues he had to deal with during his time in Panic!, he mostly spends his time denying any and all claims of having ever been in Panic! at the Disco.

Kenneth Harris seems to have faded into the ether, and for that we are all grateful.