My Chemical Romance released Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys on CD in Australia and Germany on November 19, 2010. Their fourth studio album, issued by Reprise, emerged from a decision to abandon an earlier version of the record. “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)” became the turning point, sending the sessions toward the colourful, futuristic world that gave Danger Days its identity.
The band’s first approach had been shaped by exhaustion after The Black Parade. During 2009, they worked with producer Brendan O’Brien on a less elaborate follow-up. Gerard Way told Exclaim! in November 2010 that he’d hoped a safer, stripped-down rock record would spare the group some of the strain that came with their previous album’s ambition. That solution created another problem: the music they were making no longer gave them the same reason to get excited about being in the band.
Frank Iero described the trap in a Guitar World interview first published in February 2011: “I think we defined it before we wrote the songs. Big mistake.” The band’s rules excluded characters, costumes and extra instrumentation. Guitarist Ray Toro had even been holding back the harmonized parts he would normally record. They had achieved the stripped-down approach they wanted, but felt constrained by it.
Reuniting with The Black Parade producer Rob Cavallo gave them room to change course. Toro told M Music & Musicians in December 2010 that they initially intended to add one or two songs to the O’Brien record. Way returned from a desert weekend with his wife carrying the riff and lyrics for “Na Na Na.” Recording it changed the mood in the studio; after about four songs, the band understood they were starting again. Writing where they could immediately record their ideas kept that momentum going. “Vampire Money” followed two days after “Na Na Na,” with “SING” coming afterward.
The surrounding fiction also left the music more room to move. Danger Days was framed as a pirate-radio transmission from California in 2019, a setting populated by the Killjoys and the corporation Better Living Industries. Toro explained that the characters and settings largely belonged to the videos. The songs didn’t have to tell a continuous story, freeing the band from the demands of advancing a plot with each track.
That freedom reached the guitar arrangements. On “Planetary (GO!),” Toro used an Electro-Harmonix POG pedal to make his guitar sound like a synthesizer. The restart also preserved material the band still believed in: “Bulletproof Heart,” “Party Poison” and “The Only Hope for Me Is You” were rerecorded for the finished album. As Toro explained in the Guitar World interview, those songs had continued to excite them even when the earlier record as a whole hadn’t worked.
The discarded recordings eventually acquired a release of their own. From October 2012 through February 2013, My Chemical Romance issued ten tracks from the 2009 sessions as Conventional Weapons, spread across five two-song singles. The final pair, “Surrender the Night” and “Burn Bright,” arrived with the completed box set, making those abandoned recordings available alongside the album that had replaced them.
