My Chemical Romance

Performers

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  My Chemical Romance

  Formed in NJ, My Chemical Romance made its debut in 2002 with the independently released album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. The band signed to Reprise Records the following year and made its major label debut with 2004’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, now 3x certified Platinum. The album contained the Platinum hit "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)," the Gold-certified "Helena," and "The Ghost of You." Rolling Stone hailed the 3x Platinum The Black Parade as one of the top albums of 2006. Lead single “Welcome to the Black Parade” topped both Billboard’s Alternative Songs tally and the UK Official Singles chart and is now 3x Platinum. The band toured extensively behind the album – appearing as characters from The Black Parade – and released the live album The Black Parade is Dead! in 2008. Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys was released in 2010 and topped Billboard’s Alternative Albums and Top Rock Albums charts. It was followed by a series of singles later released as Conventional Weapons in 2013. My Chemical Romance’s songs continue to rack up half a billion cumulative global streams each year. The band’s top three music videos have amassed more than 100 million views each on VEVO. My Chemical Romance will be touring in Europe and North America in 2022, and in Australia and Japan in 2023.

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  Thrice

  To emerge from a global pandemic with a renewed sense of situational awareness, hard won insight, and a new album is the kind of move we’ve come to expect from Thrice over the last twenty years. With Horizons/East, Dustin Kensrue and his bandmates address, with candor and courage, the fragile and awkward arrangements that pass for civilization, while inviting us to dwell more knowingly within our own lives. Without surrendering any of the energy and hard edge of their previous albums, they’ve given us a profoundly meditative work which serves as a musical summons to everyday attentiveness.
  
  Since forming Thrice with guitarist Teppei Teranishi, bassist Eddie Breckenridge, and drummer Riley Breckenridge in 1998, Kensrue has never been one to back down from a mental fight. This mood is set by the opening synth-driven number “Color of the Sky,” which sounds well-suited to accompany the closing credits of the Stranger Things season finale. Think Flying Lotus giving way to Elbow and setting the listener down in a new dimension. A self-recorded effort, Horizons/East conveys a palpable sense of danger, determination, and possibility. Scott Evans (Sleep, Kowloon Walled City, Yautja, Town Portal) is on mixing duties, conjuring a landscape of gloom, glow, and glory.
  
  On “Buried in the Sun,” which had the working title of “D.C. Bass,” the band’s fondness for bands like Fugazi and Frodus comes to the fore. In it we learn that there’s a military-industrial complex, a vast apparatus of legal bullying, to take on (I saw the fire on the television/the DoD or the CIA), but the threat to our mental health in acknowledging our own country’s participation in the terror trade is both immersive and interior. The psychic struggle will often come down to what we’re doing with our tools, how we hold what passes before our minds in dreams and on screens. There’s a lot to take in and a lot to be mad about, but Horizons/East invites us to slow tape and see.