A few songs into Paramore’s set on a recent Friday night at Merriweather Post Pavilion, singer Hayley Williams recalled the first time her band played the Maryland shed venue: as part of the Vans Warped Tour nine years ago, performing on a side stage attached to “a little pink truck.” This time, however, Paramore were on the main stage, co-headlining their so-called Monumentour with another band of Warped veterans, Fall Out Boy.

In 2013, both Fall Out Boy and Paramore released albums that brought them roaring back from the commercial downturn that beset nearly every other pop punk and emo band that broke through in the last decade – many of them were at Merriweather four days later for the 2014 Warped Tour. Both albums debuted on Billboard at #1, and spun off monster singles: Paramore’s bouncy pop crossover “Ain’t It Fun” recently became their first top ten hit, while “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light ‘Em Up)” has catapulted Fall Out Boy into jock jam immortality, soundtracking countless sporting events and playoff broadcasts over the past year. In an age when major label rock is rarely both good and successful, their success is increasingly rare.

Paramore reemerged on last year’s self-titled album as a trio, after founding members Josh and Zac Farro left in a huff, insinuating that the band had been nothing but a star vehicle for Williams from the beginning, backed by shady industry forces even in their early Warped side stage days. But the punk cred dog whistle of their claims barely mattered to the band’s fanbase, nor should it. A recurring theme of 21^st century pop music is female singers who’ve had to fight industry machinations to make rockier, guitar-driven music, from Avril Lavigne to Kelly Clarkson and Pink. If Williams simply muscled her way into rock stardom by starting a band, and forcing labels to accept her charisma and talent on those terms, more power to her.

Their set on Friday effectively showed the breadth and range of the new Paramore, which has transcended the pop punk limitations of its early lineup for a more omnivorous sound, even as they still kick out the early jams with aplomb. They draw from ‘90s alt-rock like Failure and classic new wave like Blondie, in addition to embracing their pop instincts more than ever. They merged the 2007 song “Let The Flames Begin” with its 2013 sequel “Part II” as a 10-minute gothic post-punk epic, with guitarist Taylor York battering a drum set and Williams holding court with a simmering a cappella breakdown. But when it was time to perform the hit power ballads “Decode” and “The Only Exception,” the band didn’t shy away from shameless prom night hooks.

The new trio form of Paramore, with Williams, guitarist Taylor York and bassist Jeremy Davis, stalks the front of the band’s brightly lit stage set for Monumentour. Meanwhile, three additional musicians (including York’s brother Justin) play on another level, on top of the wall of lights, visually separating the ‘core’ band from the auxiliary members much like, say, later R.E.M. tours. Typically Paramore’s three leaders are all animated stage presences, although Davies remained seated during Friday’s set; as was explained between songs, he’d been jumping around onstage so much earlier in the tour that he got a hernia. But the green-haired Williams made up for the difference, constantly racing from one side of the stage to the other, running in place, or hoisting her mic stand over her head like a weightlifter. At one point during "Ain't It Fun" she even crip walked for a few seconds.

Although the Venn diagram of Paramore and Fall Out Boy’s respective fanbases features so much crossover that their tour together felt inevitable and long overdue, both bands made an effort to accommodate the unconverted. For Paramore, that meant playing less of their latest album than they have on other recent tours, which is a shame; their self-titled opus earns its 70-minute running time more than any mainstream rock album since Superunknown, and many of its highlights went unheard on Friday. But Paramore still loves its back catalog, and so do the fans – one of the band’s least successful singles, the fist-pumping “That’s What You Get,” earned perhaps the single biggest crowd reaction of the night. But the finale of “Ain’t It Fun” was well earned, its rousing gospel refrain circling around for an ecstatic extra minute or two, one of the rare occasions where a rock band’s big pop crossover hit is also one of its best songs. 

As the slightly more established and successful of the two bands, Fall Out Boy fittingly closed the night, although they had to work hard to match Paramore’s energy. They mostly did so with spectacle, flames shooting up from the stage while screens showed elaborate videos synced to each song. Frontloading the set with some of their loudest, emptiest anthems like “The Phoenix” and “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race,” it felt a little like Fall Out Boy were pummeling the audience into submission after Paramore’s set navigated the peaks and valleys of varied songs and tempos. After a few songs, though, they found a groove, and the effect was more uplifting than off-putting.

Where Paramore’s frontwoman commands that band’s spotlight, Fall Out Boy has an unusual two-headed frontman dynamic in singer/guitarist Patrick Stump and bassist Pete Wentz. Stump sings the songs expertly and works the stage charismatically, but Wentz writes the lyrics and has often assumed most of the band’s rock star duties: he has a pop star ex-wife, he talks at length between songs, at the end of the show he rips his shirt off and tosses it to an eager fan. But he only occasionally gets on the mic during songs to tunelessly scream, and if he was Fall Out Boy’s lead singer they’d probably be an anonymous metalcore band in the vein of guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley’s side project The Damned Things. Patrick Stump’s impressive vocal chops and ear for huge choruses elevate the band, giving their best songs a power pop sugar rush.

Fall Out Boy took the latest-and-greatest formula to its logical extreme – all of the FOB songs heard that night appear on either last year’s Save Rock And Roll or the 2009 hits compilation Believers Never Die. This was kind of a bummer for me, personally; last year I made a playlist of Fall Out Boy's best deep album cuts that I thought made a case for why they're a much more interesting band than their singles let on. Pete Wentz even responded to it on Twitter. But the band are still bouncing back from the commercial failure of Folie a Deux now, five years later, of course they're not going to play more than one song from it, no matter how many critics tell them it was an unheralded masterpiece. 

They also pulled a song from another band's greatest hits collection: Queen’s “We Are The Champions,” played straight with Stump seated at a piano and doing his best Freddie Mercury. They then transitioned to their own triumphant piano ballad, Save Rock And Roll’s title track, which in its studio recording features an Elton John cameo, Stump once again effortlessly recreating a rock icon’s vocal style.

There were more stunts and bells and whistles, sometimes in places where perhaps a deep cut from the band’s back catalog might’ve been appreciated. Stump, who played every instrument on his tragically underappreciated 2011 solo album Soul Punk, jumped behind a kit to play alternating drum solos with Hurley over samples of hip-hop hits, stealing a page from the Travis Barker playbook. Then, Wentz and Torhman suddenly appeared at the back of the venue on a small stage, playing the hit “Dance, Dance” in the middle of the audience and a couple hundred feet away from the other half of the band. During Fall Out Boy’s rise to fame, Wentz and Trohman were known for their spinning leaps across the stage mid-song, and both seemed more stationary on Friday. But Stump made up for their lack of motion with his increased confidence in stalking the stage, putting his voice to full use in belting out hits like “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” and “Thnks fr th Mmrs.”

With the thick layers of synths and pre-recorded backing tracks from their recent albums showing up in their live sets, Fall Out Boy and Paramore both worked hard to put on show with the intensity of rock and the polish of pop. They’re careerist rock stars in the mold of Born In The U.S.A.-era Springsteen, unafraid to dance and smile and earnestly connect with audiences in a way that’s been deeply unfashionable since the early ‘90s. But any indie-centric modern rock canon that turns its nose up at the pretty boys of Fall Out Boy or the tough girl fronting Paramore is narrower, and duller, without them.