Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, My Chemical Romance return.
My Chemical Romance have re-entered the chat: after eight years and a lengthy hiatus, the emo icons are finally back with a new song, the brooding and blistering “The Foundations of Decay.”
Their last album, 2010’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, marked a maximalist combination of some of their most accessible material with a dystopian storyline, and it would have been easy for MCR to return to their positions as pop rock extraordinaires. (This is a band that has only grown more prestigious and renowned with time; the sheer reaction towards My Chemical Romance’s twice-postponed reunion tour and the new post-Warped Tour festival When We Were Young suggests that the gap they left has not been filled. This is a band that thousands still look to, a relic of an era that never quite died out — it’s just transformed and evolved.)
And yet, it’s incredibly bold for My Chemical Romance to return with a song like “The Foundations of Decay,” to prove that they, too, have transformed and evolved. The band sounds genuinely rugged and weathered, trading in some of the contemporary sheen of their previous two records for a much more progressive rock style that puts them much closer to Coheed and Cambria and various other post-hardcore outfits than their fellow 2000s pop punk auteurs.