Sugar, We're Goin Down
by Fall Out Boy
- 161
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 50
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
After Fall Out Boy performed at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, downloads of "Sugar, We're Goin Down" surged. The next week they fell, and the song dropped to number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100. Mainstream radio support then steadied it. It had entered the Hot 100 at number 93 on July 2 and peaked at number 8 on September 17, the band's first top 10 hit.
It spent 42 weeks on the chart, five of them in the top 10. In the UK it first charted in January 2006 and peaked at number 8. In the United States it had sold 4,639,000 copies by February 2013, and in August 2025 it was certified 9x platinum.
Patrick Stump composed the music and Pete Wentz wrote the lyrics. Stump told Rolling Stone he deliberately slurred the chorus because he was trying to do a straight punk song for fun. Then he noticed the rhythm was too good for that. Matt Lenski directed the video, in which a boy with deer antlers, played by Donald Cumming, falls for a girl whose father disapproves. Taylor Swift covered the song at the Chicago stop of her 2011 Speak Now Tour, and Hayley Williams joined the band to perform it in 2014.
Sugar, We're Goin Down runs at 161 BPM, the tempo of footwork, gabber and fast metal. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.49 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 373 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.