The wasteland around you is scorched and barren. All you have is your laser pistol, the clothes on your back, and a small handheld radio. You don’t know where to turn.
You’ve been on the run from the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W unit for days, and you haven’t made contact with your camp since you left. Suddenly, your radio crackles to life and you hear the sound of Dr. Death Defying, the radio jockey-leader of your resistance group. “These are the Danger Days, look alive, Killjoys.”
This is Danger Days: The True Lives of Fabulous Killjoys, the fourth studio album from My Chemical Romance. Following the overwhelming success of their third album, The Black Parade, critics thought MCR had outdone themselves and would not be able to do better. This posed a problem for the band, as they’ve always tried to outdo themselves with each release.
The band went into the studio with the goal of beating the success Parade brought them. They stripped down their theatrical style, and went back to their roots, with a heavier emphasis on their guitars, drums, and singer Gerard Way’s vocals than anything else.
When My Chemical Romance announced that they were going to strip down their style, and write a rock album because they missed its simplicity, there was outcry from the general fan base. How could a band, who has made their name by being theatrical, outdo their previous work by returning to basics?
Though the band chose to tone down the theatrics in their songs, the video singles released alongside the album prove that the boys in MCR still love acting. Like The Black Parade, Danger Days is a concept album, telling the tale of a group of resistance fighters trying to overthrow the government of post-apocalyptic California.
In an interview, Way described the album as an “anti-party album that you can party to,” and the first true song on the album, “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)” really throws this in your face.
The album doesn’t have any truly slow songs — a refreshing surprise — and it manages to stay angry throughout, punching you in the face on many occasions, and leaving you wanting more. Every song on the album (especially “Na Na Na. . .” and “Sing,” the two singles so far) is extremely catchy and will stay stuck in your head for days, no matter how many times you listen to them.
It’s hard to drop My Chemical Romance’s new album into a specific genre, but it’s well worth the wait, money, and time to listen to it all the way through in one sitting.
Here’s to My Chemical Romance. Here’s to the Killjoys.