My Chemical Romance’s 2004 album “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge” helped me cope with pandemic anxiety.

In 2006, I remember my ten-year-old self watching three specific music videos over and over during their peak rotation on MTV — “Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” by Panic! at the Disco, and “Helena (So Long and Goodnight)” by the quintessential emo band My Chemical Romance. “Helena” was the third single off MCR’s 2004 album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, their second album after their 2002 debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. I was a bit too young to be naturally exposed to the entirety of Three Cheers in ’04, but “Helena” was a hit on TV and radio for years afterwards.

Around this time, “emo” was a (mostly negative) buzzword in the lexicon. I spent time almost every day on the (actually defunct) AbsolutePunk.net reading about my favorite pop-punk bands. Even then, MCR stood out. Their look wasn’t “unique”, but it was exciting. Most importantly, their music was genuinely good. At the very least, their singles like “Helena”, “I’m Not Okay”, and the “The Ghost of You” had mass appeal whether you were a jock or a goth, especially since each song was accompanied by massively successful (and still great) music videos. When their seminal album The Black Parade was released in 2006, MCR exploded. My baby boomer parents knew who they were. It was all anyone under 25 was listening to on their iPods. Smudged eyeliner, swoop bangs, black nail polish, and marching band jackets were all the rage. “When I was…a young boy…my father…” would have been an instant Tik Tok meme if that existed at the time.

It was fall of 5th grade for me when The Black Parade released. Puberty was starting to rear its ugly head. Hormones were beginning to rage. On a broader scale, the world was an anxious place. It was the tail end of the Bush era— the economy was ready to tank, portraits of dead soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan were displayed nearly every night on the news, social media was about to explode, and the world felt much smaller than it ever did before. It was a stressful time to be a kid — too young to understand what was going on, but old enough to know something was off. MCR’s music helped to validate a lot of the fears and anxieties I was feeling at the time. They put those feelings into words and helped me turn that fear into something more positive. As a quality Black nerd girl from a conservative household, MCR helped me realize that it was okay to feel emotions. It was okay to be angry, or scared. Around this time, I listened to their back catalog after ripping CDs from the library onto my parent’s computer. I liked Three Cheers (Bullets not as much), but nothing surpassed The Black Parade for me.

The Black Parade was certainly MCR’s critical peak, and like many others, my attention towards them waned over the next several years. In 2013, around the end of my junior year of high school, MCR announced that they were breaking up. I remember many of us briefly mourned the loss of a band that we hadn’t really listened to in a long time. They had defined a formative part of our childhoods, so it was hard not to be a bit sad about it.

MCR was in the background for me for the next several years. My musical taste became much more varied. I remember participating in a sing along to “The End”/“Dead” with college buddies on a long spring break road trip my final year of college, led by a particularly talented friend with a ukulele. But that was about it. MCR didn’t seriously appear again in my life until two particular events happened: their reunion announcement in 2019, and the start of the COVID pandemic.

In 2019, I was a 23-year-old college graduate working a project management job, living on my own, paying bills. The reunion was announced on Halloween. The world was excited to know that MCR was quite literally bring the band together. Suddenly we were re-listening to The Black Parade and reminding ourselves just how well it continues to it hold up. I don’t personally know anyone who was able to secure tickets to their now-postponed 2022 reunion tour (re: COVID), but we certainly all tried.

In parallel, around this time, I finally sought professional treatment for my depression and anxiety. As I hinted earlier in this piece, I’ve suffered from anxiety and low self-esteem for most of my life. For about ten years, my “treatment” was ignoring the problem. I always assumed that just because other people had it worse than me, my condition wasn’t serious enough to require treatment. I would instead try bury my emotions and until they exploded in my face. Each time, it would take weeks for me to put the shards of myself back together, and the cycle would reset.

This changed after a particularly stressful stretch of time in the fall of 2019, which culminated in a business trip to Osaka, Japan. Instead of enjoying my first international trip to one of the most exciting countries in the world, most nights were spent sobbing into my beautiful white Hilton pillows. I spent the entire flight back to the States considering whether I should try to purposely blow up my life just to feel something. It was bad enough that I even realized for myself that I couldn’t keep going like this. I finally decided that I needed help, so I started seeing a cognitive-behavioral therapist in December upon my return. I began the road to recovering my true sense of self and overcoming the crippling fear and anxiety that was constantly trying to push me into an abyss.

Fast forward to March 2020. The world is shutting down. Life as we know it has changed. I start working from home and sitting in therapy via webcam, trying to re-baseline my life. It worked for about a month or two — I cooked all my meals, still woke up early, exercised 2–3 days a week, and spoke to people. But eventually, like many people, I hit a wall. It was that point in the pandemic when we would try to ask ourselves, “when will all of this be over?”, and there was no answer. It was the scariest feeling in the world. Then the George Floyd murder happened, and election fervor reached its peak, and once again I was thrust into yet another anxiety spiral. I stopped eating regularly. I stopped going outside. I would stay in bed all day, only to rise for alcohol or to use the toilet. I stopped showering. I stopped talking to anyone. I felt like an empty shell — it didn’t feel like life had meaning anymore. I was struggling to feel real emotions. Therapy was helping me from actually falling down the deep dark hole, but there wasn’t a lot else keeping me from the edge.

So I started leaning into things that used to make me feel good. I started playing a lot of video games again (there’s nothing more escapist than sinking 100+ hours into an RPG). I also started listening to old music. It was at this point that I came back across not The Black Parade, but Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.

Three Cheers is an emotional album. The Black Parade is too, but Three Cheers is emotional in a different way. Whereas The Black Parade is a (mostly) polished arena-rock experience, Three Cheers often sounds like it was recorded in a garage. It is a visceral, angry, and violent record. Gerard Way (MCR’s lead vocalist) screams on nearly half of the tracks. Three Cheers was the cathartic release that I needed in 2020. It’s an album that forces you to feel something. I started listening to the album over and over in a way I never did before, even in my peak emo days. At age 25 (around the same age Gerard Way was when the album was written) the songs truly hit different. In the late-2000s, I listened to these songs on the school bus, trying my best to be ignored. In 2020, I listened to these songs drunk off my ass and alone in my bedroom, no pants on, jumping up and down, because it was the first time in months that I had truly felt something.

When it comes to art, unless the artist is extremely specific about the actual meaning of something in their work, I feel permitted to make my own interpretations based on what that their work means to me. Three Cheers is a “concept album” in the loosest of terms. A man loses the love of his life, and to get her back from Hell, he makes a deal with the Devil to collect the souls of one-thousand evil men (of course, by killing them). However, according to Gerard Way, the album is also a coping mechanism for the loss of his grandmother. Regardless, “plot” is fuzzy at best when you read the lyrics, so there’s a lot of room for interpretation. The Black Parade continues the “concept album” trend by depicting the life, struggles, and ruminations of a man dying from cancer. The Black Parade does a better job then Three Cheers of sticking to its story, but it also drops the plot at several moments. At the end of the day, MCR’s music, while ostensibly narrative-focused, can also be a pretty vague, which allows for a personal interpretation depending on your perspective and where you are emotionally in life.

So Three Cheers and The Black Parade are about death. But from my perspective, while The Black Parade is about death as a slow process you must accept (death as a “noun”), Three Cheers is about death as an act, the “verb”, both killing and being killed. Just the thought of those actions can invoke strong emotion — fear, anger, anxiety, depression. Once again, but now as an adult, MCR helped validate the feelings I was keeping bottled up inside, this time through their sophomore album.

Listening to Three Cheers feels like curb-stomping your demons. It gives me a rush, in a twisted but hopefully relatable way. You could read Three Cheers as nothing more than an elaborate murder fantasy album, but it’s an elaborate murder fantasy album that channels the emotions of fear and grief in a way that took me fifteen years to fully appreciate for myself. When Gerard sings “this hole you put me in wasn’t deep enough, and I’m climbing out right now” on “It’s Not a Fashion Statement, It’s a Fucking Deathwish”, I think of the hole that my distorted cognition and toxic behaviors have put me in over the years. But it hasn’t been enough to kill me yet. There is something powerful about that.

And tangentially, this album reminded me of the ways Gerard Way played with gender through both his lyrics and persona on this record in a way that I don’t think most of us, regardless of age, truly understood in 2004. This was especially the case in the pre-Twitter days when words like “queer” or “genderfluid” were insults, or at the very least relegated to the vocabulary of the most niche LGBTQ communities (this was the time when straight/cis people were still using the word “gay” and “transvestite” as insults en masse). These themes continue to feel so authentic and relatable today in a way that I felt was worth mentioning.

I’m not saying Three Cheers is an incredibly complex album; and nor do I even think it’s MCR’s “best” album. I personally think The Black Parade is the “best” as it’s MCR at the top of their technical craft and songwriting abilities, and it’s impeccably produced. But Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is my personal favorite in 2021. It’s helped me cope with the anxiety of living in a complex, scary, and modern world in such an incredible way that I felt compelled to write about it.

I’m faring a lot better emotionally in 2021 than I did this time last year, and I can owe at least a small part of that to MCR. I hope they will still reunite for their tour next year, and I cannot wait to see what they choose to do next. Whatever it is, I don’t think I’ll forget about them as easily this time.