by Jesse Hudgins
Out of any band’s fanbase, My Chemical Romance fans might have it the roughest regarding anticipation for new announcements. On November 11, the band’s social media dropped a teaser sending the emo community into a spiral. Since the reunion of the band in 2019, fans have been begging for a new album with only a taste of new music with the release of “The Foundations of Decay” in 2022. Fans have grasped onto any small detail or inkling from social media or band member interviews to learn as much as possible. Once this teaser went up, speculation ran wild as to what this announcement would lead to. Most of the speculation surrounded the long-awaited announcement of the band’s scrapped album The Paper Kingdom. Then, just a day after the teaser was posted, the band revealed the meaning behind the announcement.
On their Instagram, the band posted a minute long video to announce they’ll be taking The Black Parade on a stadium tour in 2025. The video is extremely high quality and delves into the lore of The Black Parade that the band developed. Of course, alongside the excitement with this announcement there has been a lot of disappointment from fans who were hoping for a new record and fans who are digging insanely deep for any grasp of something on top of what we’ve been provided. The fan speculation is understandable, but as someone who’s been a fan of MCR my whole life, I’ve stopped digging deep to avoid high expectations.
Even though MCR don’t have a new record on the way, that doesn’t mean the tour announcement isn’t big. The post may indicate that MCR will be playing through the entirety of their most popular record, which makes sense as they did that at When We Were Young Fest this year, so to see them take it on a full-blown tour isn’t surprising. What is surprising, though, is that they have a different opener for each show. Some of the openers are IDLES, Alice Cooper, The Violent Femmes, 100 Gecs, and Dashboard Confessional. I think Chicago got lucky for this tour because the opener for their Soldier Field show in August is DEVO. It’s a weird mashup of bands but that seems to be happening this entire tour.
This tour is definitely going to be exciting because any activity from MCR is good activity. It shows that the band still wants to do things, and whether or not it leads to a new album or more touring is something we’ll just have to wait to find out.
