Matt Galle, the longtime booking agent for My Chemical Romance, remembers the first time he heard the band’s 2006 concept album “The Black Parade.” “I was like, ‘It sounds huge,’” Galle said, “‘like nothing I’ve ever heard before.’”
That hugeness came through both in sound — the buzzing guitars, thundering rhythms and orchestral arrangements — but also in the operatic story it told, about a cancer-stricken man contemplating whether to fight or succumb. Its impact matched its musical ambitions. The album was a landmark of emo-pop and influenced successive generations of the subgenre as well as rappers, metalcore bands and current pop stars including Olivia Rodrigo, whose LP “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” was knocked out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 200 chart by a reissue of the release this week.
Commemorating the 20th anniversary of “The Black Parade,” the band released an LP containing six additional tracks that earned My Chemical Romance its first No. 1 album. (The original release had peaked at No. 2, behind the “Hannah Montana” soundtrack.) “Great bands never die,” says Tom Corson, chief operating officer of Warner Music Group, the band’s record label, which last month partnered with the band to oversee its song publishing and merchandising rights. “They just get rediscovered.”
Formed in the Newark, N.J. area after 9/11, My Chemical Romance was part of a punk-rock inspired emo scene including Thursday and Armor for Sleep. Early on, the band scored MTV hits like “Helena” and “The Ghost of You,” but the frontman Gerard Way had grander ideas, conceiving “The Black Parade” in the tradition of classic-rock standards like David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” the Who’s “Tommy” and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” creating characters and marching-band uniforms that suggested “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in a graveyard.
The music was like “getting hit with a bolt of lighting,” Gerard’s brother, the bassist Mikey Way, said in Chris Payne’s 2023 book “Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008.”
In its initial run, “The Black Parade” quickly sold 500,000 copies, en route to more than four million, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, and graduated the band from performing at clubs to sports arenas. “It kept spreading,” Galle recalls, “and people were coming out and singing every word.”
After four studio albums, Gerard Way announced the band’s 2013 breakup in a 2,200-word Twitter post referring to “anxiety” and a “frantic” and “reckless” approach to performance. But, according to Brian Schechter, the band’s manager, a prolific following that posted fan fiction about outcasts and vampires and made moody, often skeletal, YouTube videos set to the band’s songs, carried on in their absence. “The culture that they nurtured kept them alive when they were on hiatus,” Schecter said.
My Chemical Romance returned to the road in 2022 and, three years later, performed 11 stadium concerts to revisit “The Black Parade.” Demand was such that this year the band added more than 30 additional shows; when the cost of transporting its elaborate, Broadway-style production became prohibitive for touring in South American venues, the band rewrote the stage show and delivered an alternate “prequel” at multiple gigs. They closed a U.S. tour with five late-October concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, where the band set the venue’s record for single-night merchandise sales.
Rodrigo was an attendee of a New York tour stop, posting to Instagram stories the band’s “Black Parade” title-track performance along with multiple heart emoji. Schechter interpreted her public support for the band as a selfless act. “She could easily try to block the band from being No. 1, but from everything I saw, she didn’t do anything,” he said, adding that Rodrigo visited the band the night of the show. “She just let it organically play out.”
The band’s No. 1 showing was mostly based on CDs and vinyl records — its 68,000 in pure album sales included digital downloads as well as 20 different physical variants, including a “laser-etched hologram” vinyl package, an exclusive version sold at the Hot Topic retail chain, and a $125, four-disc LP with exclusive artwork.
My Chemical Romance is unlikely to repeat atop the chart in future weeks, as steady streaming numbers for stars like Rodrigo, Morgan Wallen and Taylor Swift keep them in play for the top stop. But the themes of “The Black Parade” will continue to find new relevance. The album “deals with mortality, identity, feeling like an outsider — universal things that hit especially hard for young listeners,” said Laura Ohls, senior editor of rock, alternative and metal at Spotify. “Every generation discovering them throughout the last 20 years is always looking for music that identifies: ‘You’re not alone in feeling this way.’”
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