MCR in Q Magazine
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It's been the case of the difficult fourth album for My Chemical Romance. Four years since the career-making concept piece The Black Parade, the New Jersey four-piece are finally putting the finishing touches to the follow-up, Danger Days, but it's cost them a band member (departing drummer Bob Bryar), a vintage sports car, a bottle of red hair dye and an entire scrapped album to get to this point.
In 2008, the band took to the studio with producer Brendan O'Brien with a strict agenda: to make an album with no costumes, no themes, and no narratives - just a straight-up rock record. Promoting the album a year later, singer Gerard Way was struck with a nagging sense that they'd thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
"I was telling people it was the purest Chemical Romance album, but I realized that was bullshit. The purest Chemical Romance is fucking crazy! We're supposed to be super loud and super ambitious. The only thing we could do was go back to square one."
Second time around, Way conceived an album set in a dystopian California of 2019, a road movie about running away and growing up with a sound that incoming producer Rob Cavallo described as "an assault party." With the burgeoning concept came a new, Technicolor look featuring garishly dyed hair ("It's not pink, it's crazy clown red. Color is the new danger," he assures Q). The singer describes the effect as: "My Own Private Idaho meets Akira meets Blade Runner - some of the guys look like they sleep with men for money."
Tracks slated for the new album include punk Na Na Na, the beat-y, Chemical Brothers-influenced Sing and a currently untitled track inspired by Way's new acquired 1979 Pontiac Trans Am motor car. "It's all about getting in the car, hitting gas and no one able to stop you. It's large and bombastic. It feels like West Side Story with laser guns," explains Way.
"I'm terrified to put the album out, which is great," says the singer. "But how it's received is very secondary for me. I just can't wait to get out there and have an adventure. I want to meet crazy, fucked-up people at 3 am. Bring me your weirdest shit, Britain."