Black Parade

New Jersey, September 2001

My Chemical Romance formed in New Jersey in September 2001, after Gerard Way watched the World Trade Center towers fall. The song he wrote about it, Skylines and Turnstiles, became the band's starting point. His brother Mikey Way took bass, Ray Toro played guitar and Matt Pelissier drummed; Frank Iero joined on second guitar in 2002, the year the debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love came out on the independent Eyeball Records.

Reprise signed them for Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, released on 8 June 2004, which went platinum inside a year and turned a regional post-hardcore act into a band with chart singles. Bob Bryar replaced Pelissier on drums that same year. What followed was a decision most bands in that position do not make: rather than repeat the formula, they went away and wrote a concept record about dying.

The record that the whole thing still rests on

The Black Parade was released on 23 October 2006 through Reprise, produced by Rob Cavallo with the band. Most of it was made at the Paramour Mansion in Los Angeles, with further work at El Dorado Studios in Burbank and Capitol Studios in Hollywood between April and August 2006. It follows a terminally ill character known only as the Patient, for whom death arrives in the form of a childhood memory — a marching band coming down the street.

It entered the Billboard 200 and the UK albums chart at number two, reached number one in New Zealand, and has since been certified four-times platinum in the United States, Canada and the UK, passing three million US copies by 2018. Welcome to the Black Parade went to number one in the UK; Famous Last Words, I Don't Love You and Teenagers followed as singles. Metacritic settled at 79 from contemporary reviews, most of which reached for Queen as the comparison. Rolling Stone placed the album at 361 in its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums.

The Black Parade was never only a title. On the 2007–08 world tour the band walked out in military uniform and played the album as a separate group, an alter ego they formally killed off in Mexico City on 7 October 2007. That device is the one they have now brought back.

Split, silence, return

Bryar left in 2010, the year Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys arrived on 22 November. Jarrod Alexander has drummed for the band since 2011. On 22 March 2013 they announced they were finished, with a statement calling the previous twelve years a blessing that had come to its end.

The reunion was announced on 31 October 2019 and confirmed by a show in Los Angeles on 20 December that year. The pandemic pushed the tour back to 16 May 2022; it ran until 26 March 2023 in Tokyo. Bryar died in November 2024, which gave the anniversary run that followed an edge it would not otherwise have had.

The tour: an invented country and 47 shows

The current run was announced on 12 November 2024 and opened on 11 July 2025 at T-Mobile Park in Seattle. Across seven legs and 47 shows it has drawn more than 812,900 people and taken over $122.2m, figures that make it comfortably the largest thing the band has ever done.

The framing is new. Rather than restage the 2006 production, the band set the album inside Draag, an invented authoritarian state complete with its own written language, devised by the typographer Nate Piekos. Rob Sinclair designed the lighting and production. Act one is the album in sequence, performed in updated uniforms against propaganda footage, with actors playing a dictator and a clerk, two opera singers, a staged election and mock executions during Welcome to the Black Parade, and heavy pyrotechnics through Famous Last Words. Act two abandons all of it for a small stage in the middle of the floor.

The support bill has changed almost every night. The 2025 North American leg ran through Violent Femmes, Garbage, Pixies, Devo, Alice Cooper, Idles and Evanescence, among others. The Hives took the six Latin American dates in early 2026. The second North American leg brought Iggy Pop, Sleater-Kinney, The Breeders, Modest Mouse, The Mars Volta, Babymetal, Jimmy Eat World, The Used and Thrice. The seven-date UK and European leg in summer 2026 used Echo and the Bunnymen, Skunk Anansie, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Sunny Day Real Estate, Interpol and Mogwai, and included three consecutive nights at Wembley Stadium in July.

Where things stand, September 2026

On 10 September 2026 the band announced a 20th-anniversary reissue of The Black Parade, due on 23 October — twenty years to the day. It pairs the fourteen original tracks with six additions: three recordings from a show at Maxwell's in Hoboken on 24 October 2007, and three B-sides, one of which, Someone Out There Loves You, has not been released before. Reprise is pressing it as a double LP, CD and cassette, with coloured variants and a laser-etched hologram edition, and the artist James Jean has made three new pieces of artwork for it. The band's own statement was plain enough: twenty years ago they wrote the follow-up to Three Cheers and had no idea what it would come to mean.

What remains of the tour is short. After the North American stadium dates closed out in the autumn, the schedule ends with a five-show Southeast Asian leg, finishing on 23 November 2026 at Jakarta International Stadium. No opening acts have been listed for it. Nothing has been said about what the band does afterwards, and the Draag production is built around an album cycle that has a finishing line.

What the reviews have actually said

The critical line has been consistent. Paste described the narrative as both eerily real and absolutely absurd. The Hollywood Reporter argued the theatrics were the right way to hear the record. Loudwire credited the run with settling the band's standing over the past two decades, and Alternative Press readers voted it the best tour of 2025. Reviewing night one at Wembley, Louder called it theatre-kid bombast in stadium rock clothing and said the band does more with its audience's ticket money than any of its contemporaries.

The dissent has been about the politics rather than the playing. Exclaim! found the message muddied by the scale of the production, unclear whether Draag was aimed at the present-day United States or at something older. The Michigan Daily read it directly as a response to the deportations of 2025, and the Los Angeles Times treated it as unusually pointed for an act at this level. Both readings can sit alongside the more common verdict, which is that a room of 90,000 people singing Welcome to the Black Parade back at a band that broke up in 2013 is its own argument.