My Chemical Romance - When emo went pop

September 11, 2001. On a ferry headed for Manhattan, Gerard Way is scribbling something on a piece of paper, probably backlogged work for Cartoon Network, the company he's been working as an animator for. All sorts of things are swirling through Gerard's mind, most of them to do with music. He'd love to write songs, form a band, maybe even get famous, but for now there's only a dull, exhausting routine of anonymity. And no music. Then, suddenly, the explosion and the smoke that changed recent history. Gerard doesn't see the planes crash. What he mainly sees is the smoke, through which the ferry is still wearily trying to push its way forward, toward a destination that no longer matters, not anymore. "There was about three-or four-hundred people around me, and I was right at the edge. All these people behind me, they all had friends and family in those buildings. I didn't".

It's at this very moment, bound up with this dramatic reckoning, that, in parallel with the fate of the world, the story of emo begins moving toward its point of no return. Way takes on the role of messiah for a generation, feeling the weight of all those broken, wounded lives whose stories he knew nothing of, but with which he somehow felt a kinship. Life was too precious to let slip away in a dull job. And then there was this absurd trauma to get past, perhaps by exorcising all the anxieties and fears about the future.

Within a few weeks, Gerard puts together a band: he calls up friends and people who could at least hold an instrument, even if they lacked technique or any real musical knowledge (Way himself couldn't sing and play guitar at the same time). Drummer Matt Pelissier is the first to accept the invitation. Soon after comes Ray Toro (guitar), followed by his brother Mikey, who could get by on bass. My Chemical Romance is born. These are days of incredible ferment. Within a week their very first song, "Skylines And Turnstiles", comes to life: eyes still blinded by that massacre, and lyrics that relive the tragedy, filtered through raw, unsparing emotion. No one — not Jay-Z, not William Basinski, not Wilco, to name the most famous 9/11 "survivors" — managed to conjure an image of that event as raw and dramatic as this: "Steel corpses stretch out towards an ending sun, scorched and black. It reaches in and tears your flesh apart. As ice cold hands rip into your heart". It's an apocalyptic, sci-fi-tinged scenario, a parade of metal corpses under a dying sun, amid torn flesh and thick darkness. The song is a genuine masterpiece, the desperate cry of an American underground wanting to rise to the surface, and then higher still, retracing in reverse the path of those collapsing towers. Way's voice is harsh, mean, yet full of melody, tear-jerking, a torrential flow without a single pause. It's emo like nothing heard before: the seeds of rage and anguish that animated the bands of the Nineties are still there, but the gaze is entirely cast toward the future, the exact opposite of the introversion and self-enclosure that defined the stylistic signature of those groups.

Three months after the band's formation, the debut album is already out (released on July 23, 2002): beyond the sheer speed of it, what's striking about I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love is the superb quality of the material. A harrowing guitar with a gothic, ancestral flavor, amid static and interference, opens the record ("Romance"). It's just a minute long, but it perfectly sets the album's mood of unease, desolation, and ghostly scenery. And yet, after these languid reverberations, the killer attack of "Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough For The Both Of Us" catches you off guard. Even if it doesn't capture every nuance, emo is the only word that comes to mind to describe these constant shifts in rhythm, between sudden stops, restarts, dizzying vocal overlaps, and much more. Way spits out words in a rapid-fire, psychotic, egocentric delirium, in which fiction becomes the only possible way to keep on living.

Nothing, however, compares to "Vampires Will Never Hurt You", the emblematic track of the whole record and the foundation on which My Chemical Romance would build their career. Vampires had obsessed Gerard since his Cartoon Network days, but the way he reworks and updates the theme in this song is simply incredible. The horror-laden — and sprawling — lyrics are existentialism for the post-9/11 generation: the flood of question marks in "And If" creates unbearable tension, since these are unresolved doubts, anxieties born of horrors that could materialize at any moment. Vampires, as an old film once put it, have changed face. And it's interesting that, according to Way, they represent those who exploit others and their tragedies in order to keep cashing in. So the ending, which builds with an irresistible progression, between promises and incantations ("I'll never let them, I'll never let them hurt you, not tonight"), sounds like a plea not to be tainted by the ruthless machinery of this society.

The masterpiece of a video, far from the spectacle we'd later come to expect, shows the band in a dark room, so cramped it's hard to breathe: a lit microphone in the darkness is seized by an epileptic Gerard Way, here in full Ian Curtis mode, while images from some vampire film play in the background. It's a video steeped in a sense of anguish, yet we never once manage to take it entirely seriously: ultimately, what makes its aesthetic unique is its gruesome, grotesque humor. My Chemical Romance's music welcomes those let down by the reality they're forced to live in, but it doesn't wallow in resignation — instead, it turns horror into something to laugh at, in order to overcome it. Another emotional peak is "Drowning Lessons": the intro alone is a gut-punch, with its cascading guitars, not too far removed from shoegaze, laying down the perfect bed for Way's voice, here delivering a heartfelt, deeply committed performance. But once again it's the lyrics that hit hardest: far from being a trite breakup song, they offer images of crystalline beauty. "Without a sound I took her down, and dressed in red and blue I squeezed imaginary wedding gown that you can't wear in front of me". And if "Early Sunsets Over Monroeville" is a ballad that runs a touch longer than it needs to, "Headfirst For Halos" lands another punch to the face: musically it's a more direct track, with a clearly defined melody, but within it lie the seeds of what MCR would become a few years later. The lyrics veer dangerously close to suicide, depicting scenes of exasperated tragedy: "I think I'll blow my brains against the ceiling, and as the fragments of my skull begin to fall on your tongue like pixie dust, just think happy thoughts and we'll fly home".

The final stroke of class is entrusted to the closing "Demolition Lovers": it begins almost post-rock, with a guitar repeating the same languid tone, a faltering drumbeat, and Way's voice run through a filter. The song gradually builds in intensity until it reaches its climax at 2:50. Then, sudden silence. It lasts a second, but its effect is powerful. A slow guitar rises from the ashes of the delirium just concluded, making room for another minimalist interplay of guitar and drums, before the cathartic finale. It's a track with a clearly prog structure, a genuine lesson in how to properly handle the soft/loud contrast without ever lapsing into tedium.

I Brought You My Bullets… is an indie record. It will fail to chart almost anywhere. And yet it hands us a precious document showing the genesis of one of the most important bands of the last decade. There's no discussion of 2000s music that can leave out the impact My Chemical Romance had on their generation. This debut, perhaps immature, certainly not the best-produced, shows us a band that already seems to sense the future awaiting it, and does everything it can to ensure that one day, in hindsight, it will be given the recognition it deserves.

The period following its release is the hardest for Way. Thanks in particular to Myspace, the band's name starts to spread, and their shows see the crowds grow steadily. Soon My Chemical Romance find themselves playing in front of considerable crowds, and the frontman starts to feel haunted by the stage. Chronic insecurity and the physical stress of touring push him toward alcohol and drugs; he's often found taking the stage in a hallucinatory state, shouting disjointed phrases at the audience between songs.

This leads to tension between the singer and the rest of the band, which in the meantime has seen Frank Iero join as a permanent rhythm guitarist, after already playing on a couple of tracks on the debut album. Despite the tense atmosphere, a deal with Reprise soon follows, and in 2004 the second album, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, is released.

The debut's formula is slightly smoothed out: the songs are less fragmented, though they don't entirely give up their surprise twists. What gains the most is impact: now that there's a sizeable budget to work with, what once felt like a solid-enough sketch has turned into a fully realized painting. The guitars are thunderous yet dynamic, the arrangements elaborate, the sound giving new substance to emo. A substance that, truth be told, old purists of the scene — still clinging to the standards set by labels like Sub Pop — have never accepted, and to this day remain irritated that the word, once reserved exclusively for "their" Sunny Day Real Estate, would eventually be squandered on this "garbage". But as with all art forms, music shifts and evolves, and those who stay behind basking in nostalgia can't expect to set its boundaries. The word emo is just as legitimate for My Chemical Romance as it was for their forerunners, however distant or not one considers them to be.

“Helena” unveils the band's new punk-pop formula, with a lightning-fast verse and an epic slowdown in the chorus, but it also finds room for a breakdown with filtered vocals and feedback. Way dedicates the song to his late grandmother, but the lyrics are an inscrutable tangle of metaphors that comes across more like a love song — perhaps a bloodier one than average (“Can you hear me? Are you near me? Can we pretend to leave and then, we'll meet again, when both our cars collide?”). “I'm Not Okay” is another melodic punk song unfurled at full sail, its lyrics finding Way pining for a girl who's already taken. It's paired with a school-themed video featuring onscreen words of support for outcast kids, loners and victims of bullying. It's this sense of support radiating from the band that will drive so many kids around the world to see themselves in their music, and that, more broadly, will give the new emo such unifying power.

“Thank You For The Venom” repeats the formula to rail against religion (“Preach all you want but who's gonna save me? I keep a gun on the book you gave me. Hallelujah, lock and load”), while “The Ghost Of You” is perhaps the most introspective moment. A majestic ballad that opens with liquid guitar arpeggios before exploding into a choral chorus, it can be read as anguish over a love that's ended, or over the death of a loved one. The lyrics are murky, and there are a couple of questions that once again seem to hint at suicide as a possible solution: “And all the things that you never ever told me, and all the smiles that are ever gonna haunt me, never coming home, never coming home. Could I? Should I?”

The video, a tragic war scene, costs around a million dollars, proof of just how much the label believes in the project. That faith is well placed, because the album soon enters the charts. It doesn't reach the very top, but it lands at number 28 in the US and 34 in the UK, staying in the mid-tier long enough to sell over two million copies worldwide.

The album, however, isn't just the four singles mentioned above. “You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison” is a genuine nightmare whose lyrics deal with exactly what the title suggests: the sexual violence that often takes place in prisons. The first album resurfaces here, with unruly guitars driving a breathless chase in which Way, Iero and Toro weave their voices together in a game of screams and spoken declamations. “The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You” lays bare Way's personal struggles with handling growing success, set to one of the album's most atypical arrangements, with an organ intro, heavy use of phaser, and a music-box-like little arpeggio in the middle section. “Hang 'Em High” is a kind of horror-western, so frantic that the instruments seem to be getting mangled. “I Never Told You What I Do For Living” closes everything out by getting inside the head of a killer (“Touched by angels, though, I fall out of grace, I did it all so maybe, I'd live this every day”), before he himself ends up killed.

It would be dishonest to dismiss all this as mere chart-friendly punk, because chart-friendly punk has never been this violent. The atmosphere is deeply neurotic, tinged with gothic shades, almost always on the verge of collapse. The delivery is ravenous, raw-throated, never letting up for a second. The guitars are constantly battered and thrashed. Green Day sound like altar boys next to a storm like this, but the point is that this is simply a different league altogether. My Chemical Romance's is perhaps the only true form of American rock in the 2000s that managed to be mainstream without selling out to a safe, sanitized sound. If there's one album that defined an era, it's Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge.

Pelissier leaves the band and is replaced at the start of 2005 by Bob Bryar. The first output of the new line-up is a collaboration with the Used, a fun cover of “Under Pressure” released exclusively in digital format. It's probably not a random tribute, given the influence Queen's sound will have on the band's next album, and the role David Bowie has always played for Gerard Way's chameleonic persona.

The Black Parade comes out on October 24, 2006, and the world bows before the band. The single “Welcome To The Black Parade” reaches number 9 on the American chart, and does even better in the UK, where it tops the chart for two weeks: no emo-derived song had ever managed that before, and plausibly none ever will again.

The album quickly reaches number 2 in both the UK and the US. It will sell around three million copies in a year, in a dying music market hostile to rock. Way and co. are by now the undisputed standard-bearers of the emo scene, and the flashy videos accompanying the songs show them made up and dyed in improbable, violent colors. The neo-gothic look has a strongly kitsch flavor, and its sense of belonging sparks scenes of hysteria among the youngest fans. Less solid and consistent than its predecessor, The Black Parade remains an important, hugely ambitious project, a full-fledged rock opera. Its protagonist is a cancer patient who, after dying, reflects on the events that shaped his life.

The two most famous tracks are perhaps not the best calling card: “Welcome To The Black Parade” drowns the darkness the band had accustomed listeners to in Queen-like excess, with orchestral arrangements, operatic choirs and Brian May-style guitar, while “Teenagers” flaunts a risky Offspring-esque aftertaste. The melodies are tremendously catchy and ultimately win over the skeptics, but in terms of originality they certainly don't show the quintet's true capabilities.

Whose creativity, in any case, is far from running dry, as shown by a tracklist still full of ideas and feeling: the muscular ballad “I Don't Love You,” the aching piano march of “Cancer,” the cabaret delirium of “Mama” (where for a moment, after the first chorus, Way's hysterical voice echoes in the distance the most theatrical touches of “The Wall”). Closing things out is one of Way's high points, “Famous Last Words,” a heroic power-pop track that contrasts a melancholy verse with a full-throated chorus. The lyrics sum up pretty much the band's whole meaning and aesthetic: “I am not afraid to keep on living, I am not afraid to walk this world alone.” It's the ultimate message of defiance and redemption that Way sends out to his young followers.

Having also been abandoned by their new drummer, the band decides not to replace him and, backed by a few session musicians, tackles the new album as a four-piece. Danger Days thus comes out at the end of 2010, after a troubled gestation that saw the band start over from scratch after having recorded almost thirty songs.

What stands out here is the courage, the willingness to question themselves, and above all a handful of great songs. This time the concept draws on science fiction: in a future California, a group of rebels fights against a powerful corporation that is expanding its control over people's lives, gradually erasing their emotions. It's a theme vaguely reminiscent of the outlaw-musicians concept dreamed up almost three decades earlier by Styx on “Kilroy Was Here,” an album with which it shares a similar brashness and electronic touches. The year the story is set in, 2019, is curiously close to the time the record was actually made, which speaks volumes about Way's view of the society around him.

The single “Na Na Na” is a chanted earworm that, if you love Way's voice, you'll almost automatically like, but its bare-bones refrain tests the patience of anyone not used to such nerve. Better, then, is the slow “Sing,” with its orchestral breaks and the chorus's jagged rhythm, or “The Only Hope For Me Is You,” with its biting synthetic riff. One of the songs the band is proudest of is “The Kids From Yesterday,” with layers of keyboard, gentle backing vocals, a drum machine, tinny-sounding drums and an airy atmosphere. The more depressive My Chemical Romance is now a memory; here the music is bright, exuding open space and wind in your hair. By this point it's even hard to still call them emo — Way and co. have simply carved out a space all their own.

“Summertime” is thus one of their most pleasant and delicate songs, just a step away from britpop, while “Planetary (Go!)” is a dance-rock hybrid that would have been unthinkable just a couple of years earlier. It all closes with the glam apotheosis of “Vampire Money,” which, after an intro introducing the various musicians (as once happened in Sweet's “The Ballroom Blitz”), lets loose amid boogie piano, stadium-sized choruses and old-school rock solos.

The album doesn't repeat the success of its predecessor, since four years' absence is a long time when it comes to such tightly defined trends, but it still reaches number 8 in the US and lands in the UK top 20, easily topping a million copies sold. A long tour follows, keeping the band busy until early 2012, when it's revealed that sessions for the new album have begun, later confirmed in further interviews over the course of the year.

In September came the change of plans: Iero announced the Conventional Weapons project, a series of five vinyl singles, ten tracks in total, later gathered together in a dedicated limited-edition box set. It consists of material recorded at the start of the Danger Days sessions and subsequently shelved.

Calling it a collection of leftovers would be unfair: despite some unevenness, this compilation offers a few gems worthy of standing alongside their classics. More importantly, it gives us a valuable key to understanding that frantic, turbulent period between the release of The Black Parade and the gestation of Danger Days: sitting at the border between these two very different records, Conventional Weapons strikes an enviable balance in terms of sound, toning down the dramatic theatricality of the former while anticipating the ideas of the latter in a less pop-oriented form. The result is a compact, organic sound that in some ways revives the traits that made Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge such a success, adapted to their new arena-oriented format. The best example of this transition is "The Light Behind Your Eyes", one of the most beautiful ballads MCR ever wrote, here at their most humble and sincere emotional peak: the delicate strings recalling Patrick Wolf, the languid guitar over which gorgeous piano counterpoints are layered, the subdued, melancholy melody make it a unique jewel in the band's catalogue. With a bit more visibility, it could have become one of their many anthems. Another standout is "Ambulance", with its irresistible choruses and triumphant refrain.

The one-two punch of "Boy Division" and "Tomorrow's Money" represents the most direct moment, closest to the pop-punk of the second album. The former is remarkable, saturated with vocal layering and filtering, while in the latter we should note the firm statement of intent aimed at those who would see them as a mere marketing phenomenon: “I stopped bleeding three years ago/ While you keep screaming for revolution/ Because rebellion’s not a t-shirt you sell/ You keep your money and I’ll see you in hell”. Somewhere between serious and grotesque, "Gun" proves vital and compelling, while "The World Is Ugly" narrowly avoids mawkishness, even though its more ordinary, regular structure dilutes the dramatic message it's trying to convey.

In thirty-eight minutes, Conventional Weapons distills a meaningful sample of the many facets that have characterized My Chemical Romance's music over time, making it both a solid introduction for newcomers and, above all, an interesting retrospective for those who have already worked through their discography and want to find a connecting thread.

And so the adventure comes to an end. Gerard Way no longer feels comfortable with the project; he wants to make different music, probably throwing himself headlong into the britpop hinted at in some of Danger Days's songs. His passion for British music, especially from the Nineties, has never been a secret, as confirmed by the cover of "Common People" by Pulp, performed several times live during that album's tour.

The announcement of the breakup came on March 22, 2013. About a year later came a compilation containing all their hits, a few demos, plus the unreleased "Fake Your Death", a pleasant enough track but one that adds nothing to their story.

Authors: Gioele Sforza (introduction, "I Brought You My Bullets", "Conventional Weapons"), Federico Romagnoli ("Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge", "The Black Parade", "Danger Days", notes on the breakup)

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