My Chemical Romance have their first Number One album. The Black Parade (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) tops the Billboard 200, twenty years after the original record stalled at Number Two. The reissue moved 78,000 equivalent album units, spread across more than 20 formats and variants.
That format count is the story inside the story. A rock catalogue title now returns to the chart as a physical object first: multiple vinyl pressings, box configurations, editions built to be collected and kept. The audience for The Black Parade buys it again, deliberately, and the chart registers that decision. The band's first chart-topper arrives two decades into a career, carried by a record made when nobody in the room could have predicted this week.
When it landed in 2006, The Black Parade was the third album from a New Jersey band who had built their following through the emo circuit and then chose to spend that capital on a rock opera in the lineage of Queen. "Welcome to the Black Parade" became a Top Ten hit and the album a defining rock record of its decade. Rob Cavallo, who produced it, looked back on the record at twenty for ROMBO; the reissue itself was announced with new James Jean art. The band has spent the year bringing the album to stadiums across the U.S., and the anniversary has also produced Prelude to The End, an animated short made with Lauren Tsai and produced by her studio UNREAL INC., with voices from Billie Eilish, Phoebe Bridgers and Hideo Kojima.
The tour has not run quietly. A Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders brand owner sued the band and Live Nation over the Hollywood Bowl staging; an agreement was reached, the cheerleader-style costumes come out of the dancers' look, and the staged shootout stays. Live Nation has called the sequence parody.
What the chart number measures is narrower than what the album did. Seventy-eight thousand units of a record everyone already owns, bought again in new packaging, says the audience wants the object in hand. The Black Parade was always built as a spectacle, with uniforms and a marching band and a narrative to step into. Two decades on, the spectacle is the thing fans can hold.
