When My Chemical Romance released Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge in 2004, they were praised for being aggressive, melodic and forward thinking and quickly became one of the biggest bands on the modern rock scene, going platinum in the U.S. and selling over two million copies worldwide. But as theatrical and dramatic as the album was, it was a mere dress rehearsal for My Chemical Romance’s dark, bombastic album The Black Parade.
While Three Cheers and its predecessor I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love were loose concepts lyrically, The Black Parade is a breathtaking, fully-formed epic in the vein of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
“When we started working on the record, all of these theatrical songs that were about life and death started to come out,” says frontman Gerard Way. “That’s when we decided we wanted to throw all caution to the wind and aspire to make a huge record.”
Guitarist Frank Iero expounds, “We said let’s just dive in. We go all the way or we don’t go anywhere.”
