Update (July 21, 2016): My Chemical Romance has tweeted that the teaser is for an anniversary release of their third studio album, The Black Parade.
The original post continues below.
It’s only been three years since My Chemical Romance bid the world “so long, and goodnight” one last time, but from the looks of things, the band wasn’t ready to call it quits for good just yet. Emo fans, take a deep breath and make sure you’re sitting down for this. (Whatever “this” is, exactly.)
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What a beautiful tweet: self-referential and nostalgic, and yet just as vague as any Beyoncé announcement ever was.
The emo resurgence has been going strong for a while—at least, if you choose to believe emo ever really left. Since the early 2010s, older vanguards of the genre like Sunny Day Real Estate have been putting out new music, and erstwhile emo bands of the early and mid-aughts—your Fall Out Boys, Brand News, and Saosins—have re-united for new music and reunion tours of their own. Now, My Chemical Romance has completed the circle by announcing that it will, indeed, carry on (sorry).
But what the reanimated ghost of this band will do, exactly, is unclear. All we know is the date that something’s supposed to happen: September 23.
We are around one decade out from the mainstream emo heyday of the mid-2000s, when bands like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, and Dashboard Confessional were all fixtures on both the festival circuit and the Billboard charts. In the case of My Chemical Romance, there is a more specific anniversary coming up: October 23 will mark the 10th anniversary of the group’s third album, The Black Parade. Could a reunion tour be on the horizon? Quite possibly. Or perhaps they’ve cooked up a new album in secret, as Fall Out Boy did in 2013.
The news is surely exciting to many fans who aren’t quite done processing all of their feelings yet, but one has to marvel at how quickly the nostalgia set in: the band only broke up three years ago!
More and more, it seems the pop-culture-nostalgia train is making stops in the not-so-distant 2000s. We’re not just getting 90’s offshoots like Fuller House and Jurassic World anymore; we’re also rebooting sensations like Gilmore Girls and maybe even the Saw franchise. Even fans of shows like Gossip Girl, which only ended four years ago, are already clamoring for their own reunions. By these standards, the “what year is it” meme is already old enough to merit its own reboot.
But let’s not worry about that now: instead, hug an emo kid (or quietly embrace your inner emo kid) and congratulate them. It’s a hard world out there with so much inner angst to confront on a daily basis, but at least today, they’re probably O.K. (Trust me.)
