Something On’s Book of Jimmy Eat World Lists

Or, "Substack of Jimmy Eat World Lists," because I can't use strikeout font in the title

Despite the countless artists I regularly listen to aspiring towards “scarin’ the hoes” music, I can only think of two circumstances where my stated preferences sparked active revulsion, the kind you’d experience only when someone is literally shocked at what they’ve just heard; I’ll exclude the time a coworker walked by my office while I was playing Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and said, “turn that off, it makes me want to die,” because that’s kinda the intended effect.

Back in 2017, I was dating a woman in her early 30s whose tastes were about what you’d expect from someone who went to Northwestern, read Pitchfork in college and stopped almost immediately after she graduated. We were in an Uber that was playing some kind of local rock radio station and for most of the ride, we could both tune out whatever was playing (this being San Diego, probably something from Sublime or Californication, which would be just as true in 1999 as it is in 2017). And then, “Faint” by Linkin Park - that song fucking rules. My partner was absolutely stunned that I had this opinion, and I got clowned for the remainder of the ride. I’m not sure she ever really forgave me. 

[side note: it never ceases to amaze me how Linkin Park videos from their peak era all look like they were filmed on terrible, mid-budget SyFy shows]

Fast forward to Pitchfork Festival 2021 and I’m sitting with Jeremy Larson and a few other writers, along with their friends who were not writers but invested in the sort of artists that were playing Pitchfork Festival 2021. There was a conversation about “who’s your favorite band,” and when my time came, I said Jimmy Eat World. The woman next to me expressed some combination of shock and insult, that I should be disbarred from Pitchfork on account of journalistic malpractice. It quickly turned into outright mockery. I legitimately think I could’ve said Brand New instead and gotten a better reaction; I think people overestimate just how widespread news of their cancellation truly is and maybe that could be viewed as a choice made on youthful folly. But nah, Jimmy Eat World is “The Middle” and the guys who were touring with Third Eye Blind a few years ago.  

To take a step back, Clarity is my favorite album of all time. Despite it speaking to the sort of social situations and emotions to which I have almost no access whatsoever in 2024, it still takes me there every single time I play it. There’s a good argument to be made for Bleed American as the single greatest pop-rock record of the 21st century and Futures, Static Prevails and Integrity Blues make up a solid second tier of albums that were very much there for me in formative times of my life and make a case for a three-strong S-tier while they’re playing. But that’s about half of their discography and the gap between the B and C tier is quite vast. In comparison, Kid A and OK Computer are two albums that were nothing short of transformative for me as a person (and especially as a music fan and future critic) and the quote-unquote “B tier” includes The Bends and In Rainbows, which a pretty healthy segment of Radiohead fans might argue are their best work. I haven’t listened to King of Limbs in god knows how long, but I’ll still give it a spin every now and again, whereas I wouldn’t even relisten to Damage for the sake of this piece. 

Point being, Radiohead is probably my favorite band of all time, or at least the most impactful. But I said Jimmy Eat World to get some sort of reaction, that they’re my favorite band relative to what other music critics might say or however you’d want to describe it. And that was the reaction I got. 

Hence why I can talk on the most recent episode of Indiecast about how Bleed American is the album you play during the BBQ and Clarity is the one you play at night when everyone’s drunk and the fireworks start without really believing it - nearly every 4th of July party I’ve been to ends up playing a Spotify list of current pop hits and maybe, maybe, shifts towards 90s hip-hop or Fleetwood Mac by the end. 

Which is why I was inspired to do a Jimmy Eat World albums ranking list here, having done a songs one a few years back…but I got bored halfway through, because there was no way I could make it interesting based on my preferences alone. The top two are super obvious, #3 was way more obvious than I’d initially thought (Integrity Blues might actually be slightly overrated at this point) and Damage is the biggest lock on the entire list (unless we include Jimmy Eat World, the one from 1994, not the one from post-9/11 2001). No one really gives a shit whether I think Invented is better than Surviving, so why not just do a data dump of all the random Jimmy Eat World Power Rankings I’ve ever conceptualized, I imagine this will be more fun for myself and the reader alike.