Growing up as My Chemical Romance fans, we were thoroughly disappointed when our experience of the year 2019 didn’t include bright colors, cool lasers, adventuring through the desert, and showing soulless corporations that having hope in art and humanity is awesome. That’s, of course, what their fourth album, Danger Days, and the electrifying world they built around it led us to believe! The band are celebrating the album’s fifteenth anniversary with an expanded, remastered deluxe edition that you’ll want to ‘SING’ along to every word of, complete with songs from that era that have never been on physical copies and a few special live performances.
Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys is a dystopian concept album surrounded by some of the best world-building MCR have done to date. The story follows a group of “Killjoy” rebels – the band’s characters are Party Poison (Gerard), Jet Star (Ray), Fun Ghoul (Frank, named after the Italian way of saying “eff off”), and Kobra Kid (Mikey) – who face off against a company called Better Living Industries. The company, symbolically abbreviated to BL/ind, has taken over Battery City and are trying to take away what makes the people in it individuals. For example, they sell pills that fade emotions and even have surveillance methods to monitor citizens under their control. The Killjoys’ goal is to bring color and personality back to everyone’s lives, celebrating what makes us all human and empowering us to embrace our unique identities.
Fans could follow along with the original album’s universe through the music, a comic book series following a wider group of Killjoys, promo videos like the one below, and even fake social media profiles for some of the Killjoy characters! Three of the new deluxe songs – ‘F.T.W.W.W.,’ ‘Mastas of Ravenkroft,’ and ‘Black Dragon Fighting Society’ – first appeared on a digital companion EP that MCR created as the music the Killjoy characters would listen to.
Even if you aren’t living in the middle of the Californian desert like the residents of Battery City, the album is almost eerily relatable to today’s world. MCR weren’t necessarily prophesying anything, simply making observations about society and where we’re headed, but lyrics like “though you can see me smile, I still think of the g*ns they sell” and “love won’t stop this bomb” so hauntingly reflect how joy or a drive for peace amongst ‘Common People’ still won’t stop the powers that be from resorting to violence and control over others.
Danger Days beautifully sits with those frustrations and defeatist views, but even more beautifully, there’s just as much of a focus on staying hopeful and working to create a life you can be truly happy with. “I wrote it for the ones who wanna get away. Keep running,” Gerard shares on ‘SING,’ reflecting on how My Chem’s music has become a motivator and a lifeline for so many people around the world. He later pledges on ‘Party Poison, “Ain’t nobody gonna take my life, ain’t nobody gonna get the best of me.”
15 years later, Danger Days holds up stronger than ever as an inspiring project that inspires fans everywhere to hold onto their authenticity and dreams even while the world tries to stomp them out. It’s a reminder to let go of “who they want you to be, who they wanted to see” and to instead focus on the lives we actually want to live while we’re here. The future is b*lletproof, the aftermath is secondary, and My Chemical Romance is forever.
What do you love most about Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys? Which of the new deluxe tracks is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below or hit us up on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter! You can also buzz on over to our Reddit community to chat with us.
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Madison Murray
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