As I had posted about in my Things I’m Looking Forward To In 2020 post, My Chemical Romance had just posted their first cryptic post since their triumphant reunion show on December 20th, 2019. Since then, we had to get through many more questions before we got any answers.
The first post on January 9th was a video of symbols that were later identified as part of the Theban, or the Witches, alphabet and the skull emoji. Soon after another version of the same video came out that also included the British flag and was tagged with a location in England, but that version was quickly deleted.
Then the following week on January 14th, a photo of a hospital bed with some kind of figure under the sheet was posted. Again, the caption consisted only of an emoji, this time the vampire. People speculated that this could relate back to The Black Parade era and the cancer patient at the center of the story? By this point, everyone had a theory on what all of this could mean. New music? Were these posts related to the phases of the moon? When would we have real answers?
Days later on January 16th, much sooner than anyone expected, a video of the Trans Am from the Danger Days era music videos with the American flag emoji as a caption. At the end of the short video clip was two symbols with the letters D D. This was the post that was most striking to me. As I’ve posted before, I’ve been a fan of MCR since I first heard “I’m Not Okay” in the summer of 2004. The Black Parade came out at exactly the right moment when I was in college, and while I enjoyed Danger Days when it was released, over the last few years I had really come to love that album. I clung to it as a beacon of hope that somehow MCR would come back in 2019 because of the theories attached to it. I’d fully embraced the “Dangerverse” as people like to call it, creating my own canon around it, and even my 2019 Halloween costume (that I started planning in the summer of 2018) was an original Killjoy character that I had developed. I’m talking deep in the very specific nerd forest stuff. Seeing that car come speeding through the desert shook me to the core.
The evening of Sunday, January 19th, we received The Offering. It is a short video consisting of four cloaked figures with skull masks, the same as in their previous post, and a guitar track that sounded a lot like “Romance” from their debut album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. The video culminated with chanting and the cloaked figures coming together around a pentagram on the ground. All of this was to announce a show at Milton Keynes Stadium in the UK. Tickets went on sale January 24th, and sold out so quickly, another night was added, which also sold out almost immediately as well. On January 27th, four more festival dates across Europe and Russia were announced, and then another date at Milton Keynes. After nearly seven years away, we were getting content so fast, it was becoming slightly overwhelming, mainly because so much of it contained no answers.
The next post on January 28th was the most interesting to date. It appeared to be a staticky TV screen, but in the static was a series of sigils that fans quickly began to translate into cities across the United States. Chicago was the first one to be translated that I saw, which was immediately comforting, as it was a show close enough for me to go to, but I wasn’t satisfied. I started searching for other cities I was interested in, like Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha. Then I tried St Paul and had a match! Just as I was going to bed that night, another post went up, a video of someone preparing to do some kind of ritual with the invitation to join them on YouTube the next morning.
I was certain that this meant new music, but we really got was A Summoning. It was a 13 minute video that followed a kid through visualizations of the different eras of My Chemical Romance, all while being chased by Dracs from the Danger Days era. The photo of the hospital bed and the video of the Trans Am finally had context! And then at the end they started to list tour dates and I started to cry. September 11th in St. Paul, the day before my birthday.
Like I said earlier, I’ve been listening to My Chemical Romance since the summer of 2004. I was 16 years old and depressed (even though I didn’t realize it at the time). Then in the fall of 2019, when I was 32 and depressed (and well aware of it), they came back. On my last day of being 32 I’d finally get to see the band I had been consistently listening to for half my life. Just thinking about it now gets me choked up. After a very stressful Friday morning, which I was very glad I was not at work for, I came away with two tickets to see My Chemical Romance. Finally.
What’s next from MCR? In the two weeks since tickets went on sale, and then promptly sold out across all North American tour dates, they’ve added a couple more shows, but nothing major. I’m still hoping for new music, as I cannot believe they’ve been planning this reunion since 2017 and haven’t recorded new music, but I do not expect they would drop an entire new album all at once. I foresee if there is any new music released, there would be bundles and collectors editions made available for me to spend all my money on (which I would do happily, in case you’re reading this MCR and/or Warner Brothers Music).
Comments