UPDATE: It’s not The Paper Kingdom after all. My Chemical Romance have instead announced a “Long Live” The Black Parade North American Tour with support from Death Cab For Cutie, Alice Cooper, 100 Gecs, Pixies, and more.

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My Chemical Romance announced their reunion back in 2019, yet the only new music we’ve gotten from the theatrical emo heroes is the 2022 song “The Foundations Of Decay.” The New Jersey band did reunion tours in 2022 and 2023 and then played for the first time in 18 months at When We Were Young Fest a few weeks ago, but it’s been 14 years since their last studio album Danger Days. However, they’re finally teasing something… and fans think it’s their scrapped final album titled The Paper Kingdom.

MCR posted a cryptic image on Instagram of a hazy city skyline with confetti and three symbols transposed over the photo. The caption is even more mysterious: “If you could be anything, what would you be?” If you translate the The Paper Kingdom initials TPK from English to Russian, you get ТПК — rotated versions of the characters in the image, arranged backwards.

The group began working on The Paper Kingdom after the release of Danger Days, and in 2013 Gerard Way told Kerrang! that six songs were already completed, but then they famously broke up later that year. In 2014, Gerard revealed the title The Paper Kingdom in an interview and discussed the concept, saying:

So that My Chem record that didn’t get made it was really, not only was it really dark […] I was basically finding anything else to do besides write music […] it’s like, I cared what the songs were, but it’s like it’s gonna be a bunch of dark stuff and we’re going to build costumes and stage sets, and it’s going to be this storyline about a support group of parents who are dealing with the loss of their children so they make up this story about the children all being missing in the woods and fighting this witch and that that was what it was about. It was called The Paper Kingdom. And there may be a time in my life where I want to do The Paper Kingdom. And maybe it’s a book, or maybe it’s something else.

 

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