The last time Fall Out Boy played a pre-arena-tour club show on Islington’s Upper Street in 2013 they took to the stage in balaclavas, like a crack squadron of insurrectionist pop-punks abseiling through the windows of popular culture’s embassy after five years in the wilderness. Tonight, to audio from a cheesy Les Brown motivational speech about living your dreams, they also arrive in disguise; from a distance you’d swear they were a bona fide boyband. The freshly svelte Patrick Stump poses Nutini-ly on the monitors as The Phoenix and Irresistible sizzle with Guetta-friendly pop beats and R&B horn fanfares.

A disguise? Or is this Fall Out Boy finally unmasked? Despite lyricist Pete Wentz’s history of drugs, divorce and depression, FOB always sounded more like a punk pool party than a seminar on life’s struggles. So in an effort to regain commercial ground and shake off the cumbersome emo tag post-hiatus, it feels natural for them to more openly embrace the disco slink that always lurked at the core of This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race, or the epic populism of Sugar, We’re Goin Down. Hence the title track from their new album American Beauty/American Psycho sounds neither Garcia nor Bateman but more like a Vans Warped EDM, while the anthemic Alone Together is the sound of all of Download trying to fit under Rihanna’s Umbrella.

This, and news of their cover of Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk, might be a souring shift to those short-sighted enough to have a FOB tattoo beside their Black Flag one. But, for these hardcore few, there are still the Kraken guitars of The Kids Aren’t Alright, the demented Jam bassline of Dance, Dance and recent single Centuries, which casts FOB as Homeric heroes whose names will ring through the millennia, and somehow manages to make a sample of Susanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner sound fit to soundtrack a biblical blockbuster. They’re pure pop now, but with punch.