The quintessential sad boys of punk, My Chemical Romance, have delighted black-eyeliner-loving millennials everywhere with the news that they are reforming.
For the first time since 2012, the band will get back together – at least briefly – to perform a live gig in Los Angeles on 20 December.
The band chose Halloween, perhaps aptly, to circulate the news via an announcement on their official social media accounts, which had been given a facelift earlier this week.
“Like phantoms forever,” the band said on the posts, including a picture of a statue of two angels with the word “RETURN” alongside information about the performance and a link to ticket sales points.
My Chemical Romance formed in 2001, developing a fanbase initially through social media network MySpace before hitting commercial success with their second album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.
Their third album, The Black Parade, released in 2006, was their most popular and critically successful. Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys was the last album the band released before they split.
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(@YeeahRosie)Me walking into work tomorrow after hearing about #mychemicalromance pic.twitter.com/su4MUYukBt
When they broke up in 2013, frontman Gerard Way posted a long and florid note titled “A Vigil, On Birds and Glass”, detailing why the band were calling it quits.
“We were spectacular. Every show I knew this, every show I felt it with or without external confirmation,” Way wrote at the time.
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“My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die. It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you. I always knew that, and I think you did too. Because it is not a band – it is an idea.”
Rumours that “the idea” was re-solidifying surfaced earlier this year when Joe Jonas from the Jonas Brothers said in an interview that he heard them rehearsing in the next room in New York, though the reports were rejected by Iero at the time.
In the interim six years, Way and guitarist Frank Iero continued their music careers solo. Way released a solo album in 2014 called Hesitant Alien, and also penned The Umbrella Academy, a series of graphic novels picked up by Netflix for adaptation.
