Each week, SPIN digs into the catalog of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Tonight, My Chemical Romance is kicking off the Long Live the Black Parade Tour at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, and will be on the road celebrating their third album well into 2026, when it will turn 20. Selling over four million copies worldwide, The Black Parade is by far the New Jersey band’s most popular and most ambitious work, a concept album about a dying cancer patient’s journey into the afterlife. But it could have been bigger, in the sense that it was nearly a double album.
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Once My Chemical Romance trimmed the album down to the final sequence of 14 tracks, a few songs got left behind, including three great songs that appeared on The Black Parade: The B-Sides EP in 2006. And there was one song in particular that frontman Gerard Way regretted leaving off The Black Parade. “’Kill All Your Friends’ should have been on the album,” he tweeted in March 2013.
An anthemic midtempo track with a morbidly funny lyric, “Kill All Your Friends” is the closest cousin to the Black Parade single “Teenagers” among the album’s outtakes, which may be why it got left on the cutting room floor. The album added a lot more classic rock to the punk and emo influences that dominated the band’s first two albums, with nods to Queen and Electric Light Orchestra. “Kill All Your Friends,” however, evokes an alternative rock touchstone, “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies, with its opening riff. It’s also one of the finest performances by drummer Bob Bryar, who parted ways with the band in 2010, and was found dead in his home in Tennessee in November 2024.
The band began adding “Kill All Your Friends” to their setlist in 2007 during later legs of the tour in support of The Black Parade. A demo of the song was included on the 2016 reissue The Black Parade / Living With Ghosts (The 10th Anniversary Edition). And since My Chemical Romance reunited in 2019 and began touring again, they’ve played it live three times, which should give the song’s fans some hope of hearing it again this year as the band revisits the Black Parade era.
Three more essential My Chemical Romance deep cuts:
“Skylines and Turnstiles”
My Chemical Romance’s origin story begins on September 11, 2001, when Gerard Way witnessed the World Trade Center towers fall while interning for Cartoon Network, and decided to devote his life to music and start a band, with “Skylines and Turnstiles” being the first song he wrote for his new project.
“Cemetery Drive”
“Helena” from 2004’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is probably My Chemical Romance’s greatest song, and “Cemetery Drive” is the other track from that album that explodes into a similarly soaring, cathartic chorus.
“Vampire Money”
Stephanie Meyer took inspiration from My Chemical Romance, whose debut album included the song “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” while writing the Twilight novels. When she asked the band to contribute music to one of the blockbuster Twilight film adaptations, though, the band turned her down and wrote the snarky “Vampire Money” for their 2010 album Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys.
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