To begin the new year, My Chemical Romance announced their first North American tour in over nine years. The announcement came after the group held a reunion concert in Los Angeles to close out 2019, their first concert together in seven years at the time. Unfortunately, as it has done to the rest of the music industry, the coronavirus pandemic forced My Chemical Romance to delay their tour according to Rolling Stone.
Still, My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way is doing is best to keep fans sated by debuting new music while everyone is stuck at hime. On Saturday, Way uploaded four new songs to his SoundCloud page.
“I’m calling all of this stuff Distraction Or Despair, since that seems to be the two things I keep shifting between. Probably a lot of other people too,” Way said in the Instagram post. “But I think only some of the tracks are tied to an ‘album’ of that name. I’m just winging it, keeping it casual.”
The four songs range widely in terms of their completeness, from the 14-second experiment of “Success!” to the more finished piece of work in “Phoning It In,” a song he said he planned to originally release as a single, and “may still do that at some point when I finish them.” Each song features a detailed explanation of its inspiration behind it on its SoundCloud page. Way said “Crate Amp 2” was him “messing around with this Crate amp I got off of Reverb for cheap,” and the Stooges-inspired “Welcome to the Hotel” is something he had in mind for his comic series Umbrella Academy Volume Three: Hotel Oblivion.
Encouraging fans to donate to the COVID-19 Response Fund, Way said, “With all this uncertainty I just wanted to start uploading some unreleased stuff. Just so people can check it out and have something to listen to. Just felt like sharing.”
My Chemical Romance is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music.