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Twenty years after it stalled one place short, The Black Parade has finally marched all the way to the top.
My Chemical Romance have scored their first-ever No. 1 on the Billboard 200, as the 2006 album vaults from No. 139 to No. 1 on the Nov. 7-dated chart following its 20th anniversary deluxe reissue. The record originally debuted and peaked at No. 2, and had stood as the band’s highest-charting album ever since.
The numbers are pure, old-fashioned fandom. The Black Parade earned 78,000 equivalent album units in the US in the week ending Oct. 29 (up 653%), according to Luminate, and 68,000 of those were straight album sales.
Vinyl alone accounted for 42,000 copies, the band’s best week ever on wax, helped along by more than 20 physical variants across vinyl, CD and cassette, signed editions included. Streaming added 10,000 units, or 10.14 million on-demand streams.
Billboard puts the 20-year climb as the longest wait ever for an album to reach No. 1, beating the 15 years and nine months it took Toby Keith’s 35 Biggest Hits. The 139-1 leap is also the biggest jump to the summit since Taylor Swift’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version) soared 157-1 in October 2021.
Counted from their chart debut with Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge in June 2004, the band waited 22 years and four months for a leader.
The timing is almost theatrical. The band have toured the album since July 2025, a run that included a five-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl in October and wraps on Nov. 22 in Indonesia. On that Bowl stage, Gerard Way told the crowd the band plan to make a new record next year, days after The Black Parade also hit No. 1 in the UK for the first time.
So the black-clad, marching-band rock opera that soundtracked a generation’s eyeliner phase is now, officially, America’s best-selling album of the week, just as its makers say they are heading back into the studio.
Few bands have ever made the long way round look this dramatic. The bar for album five has never been higher.
Image: MIDDERMUSIC collage based on “My Chemical Romance at Qudos Arena in March 2023 48” by Chris.sherlock2 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), cropped, framed and tinted. Background: “My Chemical Romance at Qudos Arena in March 2023” 81, 20 and 64 by Chris.sherlock2 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped and tinted. This featured image is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
