My Chemical Romance get a lot of undeserved shit from heavy music fans. Like Nirvana before them, the New Jersey band became incredibly popular for the dark, brooding but magnificently catchy breed of punk they synthesized, which quickly became co-opted, reduced to and aligned with a capitalist culture of mall consumerism and chintzy fashion. Their ascent partially resulted in emo becoming a catch-all for eyeliner and Hot Topic threads, not the uncommercial DIY punk music that MCR's members were steeped in growing up.
All of this gave the band a bad rap with metalheads who considered them posers for taking all-black aesthetics to Top 40 radio and infringing on our proudly morose subculture. By now, the times have changed. It turns out that by achieving the success that they did, MCR became an essential gateway band into heavy music for thousands (if not millions) of future punks and metalheads, so a whole generation of headbangers have learned to at least respect the band's contributions to our world, if not admire their music for life.
For those metalheads who are still skeptical, but curious about taking the MCR plunge, we've highlighted five songs from throughout their catalog that almost any horns-throwing music fan could appreciate. These are some of the heaviest, roughest, most aggressive tracks they've ever recorded — for now.
5. "Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough for the Two of Us"
My Chemical Romance's first album is their rawest and most boisterous full-length. All of the band's melodic potential was bubbling beneath a surface of gangly riffs — part Misfits-style punk, part post-hardcore, part goth-rock — and yelpy vocal patterns that sound like rough sketches compared to the fully-realized beast MCR would become by their next record. However, its opening salvo is a crashing fan-favorite that sees Gerard Way hurling the contents of his throat over serrated metalcore licks, all while a restless rhythm section threatens to subsume every catchy moment in pure chaos.
4. "Thank You For the Venom"
If you played the opening section of this song for a blindfolded metalhead, they'd have trouble guessing if it was metalcore-era Avenged Sevenfold or a long-lost melodeath band who punk-ified Carcass riffs. They certainly wouldn't think it was the MCR boys, who dropped a viciously delectable plate of twin-guitar savagery into the middle of their sophomore album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. The main riff is savage, but so are the fuming verses that see Gerard Way's biting shouts launched over driving punk chords. And the solo? Hesher-tier shreddiness.
3. "Bury Me in Black"
"Bury Me in Black" is one for the heads — and the metalheads. While it only exists in demo form, this rarity from the Three Cheers years initially appeared on the B-side of MCR's stickiest pop-punk anthem, "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)," but "Bury Me in Black" is anything but. A scream-filled celebration of twisting guitar leads that verge on thrash metal at their heaviest points and recall Iron Maiden or Judas Priest at their most triumphant passages. If MCR made a whole album that sounded like this, they never would've ended up on the radio.
2. "House of Wolves"
The Black Parade is the MCR album that made them the divisive megastars they are today. They leaned into the gothic theatricality of Three Cheers, writing more heart-wrenching ballads, snarky pop-punk bangers and of course their mini rock opera, "Welcome to the Black Parade." The record's gnarsty outlier is "House of Wolves," a careening freight car of a punk song that screeches forward with lacerating pick slides, tumbling drums, sky-ripping guitar solos and Gerard Way's voice at its most maddeningly eccentric.
1. "Foundations of Decay"
"Foundations of Decay" might be the heaviest song MCR have ever released. Every aforementioned track has metallic elements, but this single that they spontaneously dropped earlier this spring has parts that are more metal than they are punk. The smokey verses explode into a gigantic post-metal dirge in the chorus, and Gerard Way lets rip his most pained screams yet during the chugging breakdown that swallows up the song's middle section. MCR's last full-length was their brightest and poppiest affair, but "Foundations of Decay" is the exact opposite, pointing to a future that metalheads can look forward to.
