My Chemical Romance’s ‘The Black Parade’ at 20: Every Track Ranked

Where do we go when we die? The pharaohs thought we’d need our earthly possessions, so they got buried along with them; today, surveys suggest a solid third of Americans believe in ghosts. My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way thought death transported us to a poignant moment from our lives — like when his father took him into the city to see a marching band. 

When My Chemical Romance — Way, his bassist brother Mikey, guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, and drummer Bob Bryar — released The Black Parade on October 23, 2006, they were emo up-and-comers seeking to be the world’s greatest rock band. They were fresh off playing Warped Tour parking lots with Fall Out Boy, and opening arenas for Green Day while they toured on their smash rock opera, American Idiot. To follow their 2004 breakthrough Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, the Jersey quintet escaped to L.A.’s long-rumored-to-be-haunted Paramour Mansion with Idiot producer Rob Cavallo to record their magnum opus. Commercially, The Black Parade performed well: It sold 240,000 copies its opening week, but ultimately finished second on the Billboard 200 to the Hannah Montana soundtrack’s 281,000.

But this week, two decades later, My Chemical Romance finishes the job by reaching the top of the Billboard 200 (on the chart dated Nov. 6) for the first time. Their 20th anniversary deluxe edition of The Black Parade (released Oct. 23 on Reprise) propels the set to No. 1, backed by an ongoing reunion tour that’s earned them an army of new fans. There’s a strong argument that MCR is even bigger today than at their MySpace-era apex. 

Let’s have some fun, and revisit the legacy of arguably the most resonant rock album since Nevermind. We’ve ranked all 14 original Black Parade tracks, along with the four additional B-sides included on the 2026 re-release.

• “Someone Out There Loves You”

  The Black Parade tells the story of The Patient, a man dying from cancer, who relives his life journey on a hospital gurney en route to a final decision: pass into the next world, or soldier on?

  This live-cut B-side, the only one that didn’t get the studio treatment, dovetails with The Patient’s climax. It’s an anti-suicide plea that rings righteous and urgent, albeit on a theme MCR already perfected on a song we’ll see much higher on this list. 

• “Heaven Help Us”

  A serpentine riff drags us to the underworld for this fiery B-side. It would have been a fine achievement for plenty of other third wave emo bands, but for MCR, it’s just working territory that’s done better on the album proper.

• “Kill All Your Friends”

  Back in 2013, Gerard tweeted that this B-side should have made the final tracklist. There’s a case to be made: the very Pixies lead riff is a fun change of pace, and the ba-ba-ba chorus bounces just so, balancing Gerard’s very on-brand bury-your-past lyrics. 
  

•  “My Way Home Is Through You”

  This straight-ahead burner is a throwback to MCR’s 2002 debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. It still rocks, but given the band’s  artistic growth — especially Mikey’s more agile basswork and a thunderous new drummer in Bob Bryar — it feels a bit stuck in the past on MCR LP3.

• “Blood”

  Where would we be without the bizarro jingle/hidden track that closes the original Black Parade? We’d be missing some self-aware levity just after the weight of “Famous Last Words”… and Gerard wouldn’t get to do this every night on tour.

• “I Don’t Love You”

  Ah, the breakup ballad. You could tell My Chemical Romance had arena aspirations when they blurred the opening notes of Coldplay’s “Yellow” to black and red for this Black Parade cut, a European hit.
  

• “Disenchanted”

  The Patient looks back on his life with this nostalgic power ballad, the penultimate proper song on Black Parade. MCR had been performing a proto-version of “Disenchanted” since the Three Cheers years, added it at the eleventh hour to Black Parade, and typically only plays it live when they’re doing the album start-to-finish.

• “House of Wolves”

  If MCR hadn’t gone full glam on “Teenagers,” full cabaret on “Mama,” full everything on the title track, “House of Wolves” would be more celebrated for what it is: a rip-roaring rock song on a rip-roaring rock album. The bright side: If this is your album’s 11th best song, you’re working on a classic. 
  

• “Sleep”

  My Chemical Romance recorded most of Black Parade at The Paramour Mansion, a famously haunted pre-war estate in Los Angeles. Night terrors crept into “Sleep” via Gerard’s own voice memos interspersed through its quieter moments, along with a manic edge to Toro and Iero’s electric guitars driving the song home.

• “Cancer”

  Gerard plays the role of the dying Patient most memorably on this piano-and-strings ballad, lips “chapped and faded,” body “soggy from the chemo.” It’s a difficult listen for anyone, all the more if the subject matter hits home. But it’s also a rare rock and roll moment where you forget you’re listening to punk dudes from Jersey and not some alien subgenre of musical theater.

• “The End”

  You could discount it for being a mere intro, but Black Parade doesn’t explode into a rock opera without the immortal bars Gerard drops in these two minutes. “Now come one, come all to this tragic affair” is right up there with Prince’s dearly beloved, Bruce’s screen door slamming, and Britney’s b–ch among all-time album openers. The stakes surge skyward from there.

• “Dead!”

  Track two on Black Parade, you can’t really place this song anywhere but right after “The End.” Written as a vengeful pop-punk take on “Mr. Blue Sky” or “I Want You to Want Me,” Black Parade’s first full-fledged song succeeds at everything it sets out to do, and starts The Patient on his afterlife odyssey.

• “This Is How I Disappear”

  Post-hardcore with panache, “Disappear” is The Patient’s seance with a former lover as he sinks further from our earthly realm. If MCR never aspired to write Tommy or “Bohemian Rhapsody” for the MySpace generation, this could have been a solid single for rock radio. Thankfully they did, because “solid single for rock radio” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

• “Teenagers”

  It’s a good thing Way got over his irrational fear of random teenagers on the subway, or otherwise he’d have a hard time facing two-thirds of who’s filling stadiums at MCR shows these days. “Teenagers” is the band’s most-streamed song on Spotify by a decent margin—a testament to its cross-generational appeal as 2:42 of power-glam perfection.

• “The Sharpest Lives”

  A proper sendoff to the Three Cheers era, “Sharpest Lives” reflects My Chemical Romance’s mercurial second album: “Helena”-sized hooks and lyrical nods to Gerard’s darkest days, before he’d saved his life by sobering up to write Black Parade. It’s been long-rumored to reference Gerard’s self-destructive friendship with Used frontman Bert McCracken, who by 2006 was an ex-friend who’d taken a very unsober path. 

• “Famous Last Words”

  The My Chemical Romance mission statement. “I am not afraid to keep on living, I am not afraid to walk this world alone.” That’s the refrain from “Famous Last Words,” and while delirious British tabloids claimed “no child is safe from the sinister cult of emo,” this song stood as Exhibit A for why suicide is something My Chemical Romance was very clearly against. “[Insert band here] saved my life,” is common parlance in rock fandom; on that note, this song may have touched more lives than any other.

• “Welcome to the Black Parade”

  You know those piano notes. You know Bryar’s acrobatic drum fill into the first verse. The big key change. The black marching band costumes they premiered with the song atop 30 Rock at the 2006 VMAs. You know that they’ll carry on. But we’ll never know what happens when we die, and that’s why we’re still spellbound.

• “Mama”

  If I was The Patient, I’d choose to live after hearing this, too. 

  The Black Parade at its heaviest on a polka-cabaret breakdown. Gerard screaming for Mama (played by Liza Minelli, of course), unhinged and selling every second of it. And then there’s the song’s evolution. Though they’ve always welcomed a diverse audience, MCR crowds have gotten a lot more visibly queer since their 2019 reunion, and the second verse of “Mama” gets screamed as loud as anything on Black Parade. 

  It’s camp. It’s dead serious. You don’t know where one ends and the other begins. All the more reason to keep coming back.