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My Chemical Romance have spent nearly seven years back together without a new album; on Devil’s Night, Gerard Way finally put a year on one.
Playing the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Friday (October 30), the frontman told the crowd, “So yeah, next year, we wanna go make a record.” The band are “probably not doing any shows” in 2027, he added — “there’s no secret code to that” — before signing off with: “Hopefully we’ll see you guys in 2028.”
The moment was caught in fan footage and first reported by NME. Way prefaced it by warning that his stage talk can sound deliberately vague, only to protect everyone’s feelings. This time, it didn’t.
To be clear, this is a stated plan, not an album announcement: no title, no release date, no rollout. But a year blocked out to write and record, with the road switched off, is the closest thing to a timetable the band have offered since reuniting in 2019.
It would be their first album since 2010’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. The reunion era has so far produced just one new song, the slow-burning “The Foundations of Decay” in 2022.
Way had already hinted from the stage in September that the band always wanted to make another record. Friday turned that wish into a date.
The timing is hard to ignore. The same day, The Black Parade reached No. 1 on the UK’s Official Albums Chart for the first time, two decades after it stalled at No. 2 in 2006, lifted by an expanded 20th anniversary reissue.
A band that can top the chart with a 20-year-old record has nothing left to prove — which is exactly why a new one matters.
Devil’s Night was a night of overdue reunions, too. The Used’s Bert McCracken, a close friend turned estranged rival in the mid-2000s, told the crowd “mom and dad are back together again” before Way joined him for “Buried Myself Alive.”
McCracken returned the favor during My Chemical Romance’s headline set on “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison,” the pair’s first time sharing a stage in around two decades.
The band also aired “We Don’t Need Another Song About California,” a Danger Days-era bonus track, for the first time, with Way calling it “a beautiful song” they had “never played live before.”
The five-night Hollywood Bowl run wraps tonight (October 31) with Thrice in support, before an Asia leg that opens in Incheon, South Korea, on November 7 and closes in Jakarta on November 22.
After that, if Way’s word holds, the parade goes quiet and heads for the studio. Sixteen years after Danger Days, one more year of silence sounds like a bargain.
Featured image credit: My Chemical Romance on stage at Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney, March 2023 (collage). Photos: Chris.sherlock2 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped, framed and tinted). Featured image licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
