Imagine your world in the year 2019. You live in Battery City, California, where danger and fear have been completely eradicated. Where emotion-eliminating meds are as easily had as vitamins and all risk and daring—all freedom—have been traded for a safe, predictable, homogeneous existence courtesy of Better Living Industries, a corporation that strives to bring about structure in a post-apocalyptic world.
Now imagine that on the outskirts of this benumbed hub of uniformity lies something different. Something wild and untamed. A resistance against the insidious corporate behemoth led by a gang of rabble-rousers that go by the name The Fabulous Killjoys, aka the alter-egos of My Chemical Romance band members: "Party Poison" (vocalist Gerard Way), "Jet-Star" (lead guitarist Ray Toro), “Fun Ghoul” (rhythm guitarist Frank Iero), and "Kobra Kid" (bassist and younger brother of Gerard, Mikey Way). Along with their guide, a pirate radio DJ named Dr. Death Defying, this feckless band of outlaws use subversive radio transmissions to spread crackling missives of hope, defiance, and love, and to glorify having a good time.
So goes the premise of Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, the fourth album by My Chemical Romance. Released this past November, the high concept album is generating some impressive buzz. It is being called “epic” and “confident.” Some feel the album makes much of the band’s older work almost irrelevant. Dan Martin gushed all over it in the British music magazine NME, going so far as to call Danger Days the "best rock record of the year by such a margin that you actually feel rather embarrassed for everybody else." But much of the reaction by critics and fans alike may be due to pure surprise. After all, Danger Days doesn’t exactly fall in line with the predicted trajectory of a band who spent years in eyeliner, delivering glammed-up melodrama for smart kids. Two years in the making, the album isn’t more of the same old thing. That Danger Days is consistently floating to the top of many year-end lists says a lot about the music that has redefined My Chemical Romance in a big way and brought them back from the brink of self-destruction.
In May 2008, My Chemical Romance were running on fumes by the time they hit the stage at Madison Square Garden. Road-weary and more than a bit emotionally battered, the band appeared to be on their last legs. Frontman Gerard Way was especially heartsick and confused after the Daily Mail of London used the band's somewhat ominous name (which, by the way, is a reference to the work of author Irvine Welsh) to shoehorn the group into controversy after the suicide by hanging of a 13-year-old Kent girl in which emo music in general, and MCR in particular, were blamed. "Gerard was really taking it hard, and we were all ground down from the tour cycle," said guitarist Ray Toro. "Being from Jersey, that show should have been a celebratory moment for us, and it wasn't. When we left the stage I think people thought it might be our last show.”
If you look a little deeper into Danger Days, past the weapons, costumes and car chases, down to the nuts and bolts of the band’s cinematic approach to rock ‘n’ roll on the album, you might be surprised to know that the entire sci-fi fantasy angle sprang from the mind of Way, who attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and interned at DC Comics' Vertigo imprint before he took a detour into rock stardom. When times got tough for the band and they went off in different directions after the Madison Square Garden performance, Way immersed himself in comics with the subversive superhero series Umbrella Academy, a collaboration with Brazilian artist Gabriel Ba, and quickly proved he wasn't one of the many Hollywood names dropping in on the suddenly fashionable Comic-Con scene. The series won an Eisner Award, the highest honor in the industry.
After months of soul-searching, and with Way in such a fertile place, MCR band members returned to the studio in the spring of 2009 with producer Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen). The plan was to strip away the glam and get back to basics with a hardcore punk sound. Way felt pressured to write an album for grown-ups this time out. The band spent nearly a year recording new material with O’Brien, the overwhelming amount of which they absolutely hated in the end. It was at this creative crossroads that the band decided to scrap the entire album and start fresh with Rob Cavallo (Green Day, Shinedown).
In facing the daunting task of having to completely rewrite Danger Days, Way used his love of comic books and old sci-fi films as a jumping-off point and drew inspiration from the band Judas Priest and their power-anthem metal. He was also inspired by one of the decade’s cinema classics. "I watched a lot of Blade Runner, and I watched a lot of the Making of Blade Runner,” he said. It was during an interview with the film's director Ridley Scott that Way realized he had to fight to the death for his art. What resulted was a concept album that feels like Mad Max re-imagined with guitars. "It feels like a victory to see art win over fear or commerce," says Way. "Art won this time, and it made me feel like I could do what I do another ten years. It's strange how we got to this place, but I think there was no other way to do it."
MCR’s new colorful image as of late (Way has even changed his hair color from emo black to fiery red) is a sharp contrast to the one that accompanied their hugely successful third album, 2006s The Black Parade. This is a very different band to the one who used to write about walking around in graveyards and who was used as a media scapegoat for the “cult of emo” four years ago. "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)," the album’s lead single, is essentially a f*** you to emo with its pumping drum line and blistering guitar paired with the creepy child like na na na refrain. Spin calls it an “in-your-face punk anthem.” The song has become one of the biggest rock ‘n’ roll singles of the year.
The second single to be released from the album was the poppy, slinky, just a little bit funky “Sing,” with its euphoric call to mass doing-stuff-together. Way says it’s the song he’s most proud of on the record. “What I love about it is that it's the band finally writing music free of genre or anything else—writing music solely as fans of music and with a very broad, direct, world view.” As the fourth song written for the album, “Sing” proved to be the a-ha moment that made the band feel they were finally onto something and encouraged them to see the project through to the end.
Among the many standouts on Danger Days—from the Hindu-inspired “Destroya,” to the nostalgic “The Kids from Yesterday,” to the raw energy of “Party Poison”—is the ode-to-selling-out closer “Vampire Money.” Where other bands are lining up to be included on a soundtrack to one of the films in the Stephenie Meyer Twilight franchise, My Chemical Romance not only declined to write a song for the New Moon soundtrack, they wrote a song in reaction to declining the offer. Way said that the reason the song is on the album is because "there’s a lot of people chasing that f***ing money. ‘Twilight?’ A lot of people around us were like, ‘please, for the love of God, do this f***ing movie.’ But we’d moved on."
Indeed they have. Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys is a daring, DayGlo-wall of noise from start to finish. Although forced to take a giant step backward to get to this point, and after having suffered the sudden and mysterious loss of drummer Bob Bryar during the recording of the album (both sides maintain the parting of ways was amicable and mutual but will say no more on the matter), My Chemical Romance pressed on through the weight of adversity that might have taken a lesser band down. Way and his bandmates consider the chaos of the past two years a healing exercise from which they have emerged a better, badder band.
