My Chemical Romance is dead, long live My Chemical Romance.

When the world’s most popular emo band* called it quits in March of 2013, it sent shockwaves through the international Hot Topic scene. Their last album, 2010’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys might not have reached the heights of 2006’s The Black Parade, which saw the band hit their stadium goth glam peak, but they were still My Chemical Romance. You could still get made fun of by more mainstream music listeners and other goth people for enjoying their music, which is a delightful quirk and unappreciated aspect of being a My Chem fan. No matter how popular they are or how many songs they release with “vampire” in the title, there are still so many people who will think you’re lame for listening to them on both sides of the popular music to niche music spectrum. It rules.

In the same way My Chem walks that line between being both weird and mainstream so well, the announcement that they were breaking up the band and exploring their own individual projects was both a shock and completely predictable. The band may all have the heart of a 16-year-old goth boy, but in real life, they were all adults. They were married, had children, and were interested in exploring other artistic endeavors outside of the band. And they did. Guitarist Frank Iero formed his own band and changed its name three times for fun, lead guitarist Ray Toro filled in for other bands and recorded a solo album, bassist Mikey Way also started his own band, and if you’ve ever listened to “Action Cat” or watched The Umbrella Academy on Netflix, you already know what front Gerard Way was up to. Some of these projects were more successful than others, but it was clearly a very real breakup.

Unless you’re me, and you subscribe to the randomly generated pop culture theories my subconscious spits into my conscious. Not to say I’m smarter than anyone and I’ve been calling this since the beginning, but I do think my mind wanders more than the average bear. I have a completely under researched theory that the “band breakup” as we know it is dead, at least for successful bands. Your local hot DIY project may truly break up for good when one of the band members moves to Philly (or out of Philly if you’re reading this in Philly), but when a band reaches a certain level of success, there’s no such thing as a breakup. Every breakup is merely a hiatus without a publicized end date. See LCD Soundsystem. The exception to the rule is when someone in a band is discovered to be a sex pest. See Brand New.

I know being a musician doesn’t rake in the kind of cash that it used to, but the thing about being in a successful band that can sell out The Anthem or Merriweather Post Pavilion or an entire arena, is that it does still pay good and you still get to make art with people you (hopefully) like. And that’s not including the endorphins you probably get from the popularity, and the social capital that comes with it all. It might be easy to walk away from that when you’ve been doing it for a decade straight, but it’s hard to stay away when you’re 10 years out from that “breakup” and you’re staring down the barrel of nostalgia and your kid’s future college fund (in the metaphor it’s a double barrel gun). That being said, Gerard Way did have a robust career in the comic book industry that was completely separate from the band and music in general, so if any “breakup” did have legs, it was this one.

The writing was on the walls when the band announced a slew of international tour dates in 2020. Sure, it was a reunion, but it wasn’t even billed as an anniversary tour for Danger Days. If the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t taken place, there’s no doubt in my mind that we would have gotten new My Chemical Romance music that year, or at the very least in 2021. 2020 being what 2020 was, many of those shows have been postponed two years in a row, but with venues reopening and vaccines existing and people generally being more willing to take on varying levels of risk, all bets are off and the band is fully back together. 

Which leads us to the right now. On Friday, May 13th (you can’t deny those Hot Topic tendencies), My Chemical Romance dropped their first new song in almost 10 years (depends on if you count “Fake Your Own Death” off of their greatest hits album, I surprisingly don’t have a dog in that fight), “The Foundations of Decay.” At a casual six minutes long, the track manages to mythologize the band, introduce a proggier, grungier sound more reminiscent of the music off their first album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, and lay the literal foundations for the music that’s to come. We are after all in the emo revival, and there’s no way you can convince me that the line, “Now, if your convictions were a passing phase,” wasn’t born out of the same nostalgia trip that created the “it wasn’t a phase, Mom” TikTok trend.

And it owns. I’m having a great time listening to it on the metro right now as I write this. The breakdown reminds me a lot of Coheed and Cambria circa Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness (so much of being into this kind of music is just memorizing overly complex album titles). I find the 9/11 line to be cringey, but you can’t deny the scene that’s being set with this song; it’s the reverse phoenix, instead of making their reunion sound like this glorious exciting thing, they’ve mired it in the ashes and bugs and cracked concrete of a ruined city. It’s a fun flip on the norm that also maintains the outsider POV that made My Chem songs feel so potent, even if you weren’t a teenage any more. This isn’t “The Boys Are Back in Town” it’s “The Boys Have Grown Old and Weary, Yet They Have Returned To A World That Has Forsaken Them.”

But the world hasn’t forsaken them. My Chemical Romance has sold out arenas, stadiums and music festivals all over the world. They’re back baby, but more than that, they never left.

*If you’d like to argue about this, please find me on Tinder.

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