On Monday, My Chemical Romance teased fans on Instagram with a new mysterious project, sending them into a frenzy.
The band shared a photo of a hazy city skyline with confetti falling and Russian letters that when translated, read “TPK”. “If you could be anything, what would you be?” My Chemical Romance captioned the cryptic post.
Fans have naturally begun freaking out on social media, suggesting that the band has begun teasing their scrapped 2013 album "The Paper Kingdom".
In 2013, it was revealed that the band had completed six songs from the record before scrapping the album and breaking up the following year.
In 2014, frontman Gerard Way got candid about the album in an interview following the band’s split: “So that My Chem record that didn’t get made it was really, not only was it really dark […] I was basically finding anything else to do besides write music […] it’s like, I cared what the songs were, but like it’s gonna be a bunch of dark stuff and we’re going to build costumes and stage sets, and it’s going to be this storyline about a support group of parents who are dealing with the loss of their children so they make up this story about the children all being missing in the woods and fighting this witch and that was what it was about. It was called ‘The Paper Kingdom’. And there may be a time in my life where I want to do ‘The Paper Kingdom’. And maybe it’s a book, or maybe it’s something else.”
The tease comes after My Chemical Romance quashed hopes of a reunion album earlier this year after a slew of strange posts shared on their Facebook.
Skepticism grew when the band proceeded to post a number of bizarre posts, leading fans to question if there was a legitimate reunion on the horizon or if they were hacked. Writing on Instagram, they said: “Our Facebook got hacked,” warning fans: “Don’t believe everything you read!”.
However, it would seem that the newly-posted tease isn’t a hoax: fans were quick to spot that My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero and Mikey Way have shared and liked the post respectively.
The emo icons wrapped up their lengthy reunion tour in March last year. Their first show back together took place in December 2019, and their COVID-delayed world tour began with two shows at The Eden Project in Cornwall in 2022.
They most recently performed "The Black Parade" in full for the first time since 2007 at the When We Were Young Festival.
The band’s most recent material was 2022’s "The Foundations of Decay" – a surprise single that marked their first new release in eight years, with their last full-length album being 2010’s "Danger Days".