The Black Parade at 20: the patient gets a reprieve

The Black Parade is a rock opera concerning a man dying of cancer, and two decades later it has survived the original version of the band that created it. My Chemical Romance revealed an expanded anniversary reissue this week. Put the record on again and it doesn't act like a reissue: it still takes a small, intimate death and presents it at the scale of a parade.

The band came together in New Jersey during September 2001, after Gerard Way witnessed the World Trade Center towers collapse, and they were never casual regarding scale. A debut, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, appeared on Eyeball in 2002. Reprise signed them the next year and put out Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge in 2004, which went platinum and turned them into the biggest band in a genre they kept refusing to join. Then The Black Parade, which overshadowed all of it. Danger Days came in 2010, the Conventional Weapons singles in 2012 and 2013, a breakup in March 2013, a reunion in 2019, a tour into early 2023, and "The Foundations of Decay", their first new release in eight years, in May 2022.

They tracked it from April through August 2006, working with Rob Cavallo, holed up at the Paramour Mansion. The seclusion took a toll: the pressure fell heaviest on bassist Mikey Way, and it shaped the songs. Reprise released it on October 23, 2006. It hit number two in the US and number two in the UK, went four times platinum in America, Canada and Britain, and yielded four singles. The tour supporting it stretched from February 2007 to May 2008.

Thirteen tracks plus a hidden one, with zero desire to stay in one lane. The album pulls from a mix of emo, pop-punk, hard rock, glam, punk and alternative rock: glam brings the stomp, punk the velocity, the pop-punk label the hooks that turned them into a radio band. The Patient, the dying figure at its core, keeps the entire thing anchored. "The End." begins like a curtain rising, and "Dead!" and "This Is How I Disappear" maintain the momentum as the narrative lays out its rules.

"Welcome to the Black Parade" is the centerpiece, their first UK number one single, and it encapsulates the album's entire argument in a single chorus. "Cancer" is the shortest track here at 2:22 and the most straightforward title on a record that otherwise dresses everyone up. "Mama" is the one they brought King Diamond out for on Saturday in San Antonio, a sword and a knighting before he joined them on it. "Teenagers" is the second of the four singles and the simplest entry point for anyone who finds the rest too theatrical. "Famous Last Words" concludes the narrative, and "Blood" hides after it.

It's for those who were fifteen when it came out and are thirty-five today, and it keeps gaining new listeners. An album that moved this many copies and has been reissued twice doesn't require justification. It stands alongside Green Day's American Idiot as one of the decade's two major rock operas, and it's the one that metalcore, pop and hip hop later drew from, as well as film soundtracks and years of alternative fashion. If you're after a band in costume singing seriously about death, this is the origin, and it surpasses the imitations.

The problem lies in the latter portion. After the singles are exhausted, the concept begins doing work that the songs ought to be doing, and the album's scope becomes a drawback: too many tracks are asked to sustain a scene. "Disenchanted" is the most obvious instance, bearing a stretch the narrative requires and the song cannot support by itself. "Blood" then places a hidden track onto a record that had already concluded properly. Twenty years have not made either choice neater.

Four, then. It justifies its length and largely endures it, which is more than the records that came after managed. Gerard Way stood in the Alamodome on Saturday and said the band had always wanted to make another one. They have twenty years of evidence regarding which record they would be chasing.

The tracklist

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