New Music from Gerard Way!

Gerard Way is best known these days as the creator/writer of the comic series The Umbrella Academy which is in production now for a Netflix adaptation releasing in 2019. If the Netflix track record for original series holds its going to be a mega-success. But before that, Gerard was the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. A band that has always unfairly been lumped in to the toss away “emo” field by cynics. MCR was always better than most of their contemporaries and the only proof you need is the band’s brilliant magnum opus The Black Parade. That album still stands as one of the best rock albums of all time.

This clip from the must own The Black Parade is Dead! DVD set shows how the band delivered on stage in a massive venue during the final performance on The Black Parade tour.

And the energy they brought to tiny venues as well in this hometown performance on the same DVD set. Strip away the costumes, pyro, and artifice and you have a group of musicians that were among the best in the rock/pop/punk genre.

The Black Parade was always intended by the band to be their final album. Instead they released one more, the convoluted Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. Based on the title you will not be surprised to learn this was a concept album sale as The Black Parade.

While it didn’t have the bombshell impact of The Black Parade, Danger Days still performed well and yielded some huge hits, including “Sing”. After the tour wrapped up MCR called it quits permanently white still very much at the top of their game.

Which brings me to the reason I wrote this post in the first place. Gerard Way released his first solo album, Hesitant Alien, in 2014. In the time since, other than some appearances on friends’ albums, he’s been mostly absent from the music scene. But now, finally, he’s back with a new single called “Baby You’re A Haunted House”!

The song is a slice of pop-rock brilliance and one of my favorites of the year. Featuring distorted guitars, pounding bass line, clever lyrics, a ridiculously catchy riff, and a chorus that sticks in your brain like melted candy corn; “Baby You’re a Haunted House” is a masterpiece.  Its a radio ready single that would have stormed to the Billboard #1 slot without a problem if it had released 20 years ago. Feel free to listen to it 5 (or 10) times in a row. The song is a very tight 2:46 which makes it all the easier to binge on.

Enjoy! And welcome back, Gerard. Keep the new tunes coming!