The Black Parade 2026 Tour featuring My Chemical Romance
Coors Field – Denver, Colorado
Photography by: Bryce Hall | 8/27/26
My Chemical Romance Brought The Black Parade to Denver. Even the Moon Got the Dress Code Memo
I’ve waited roughly 20 years to see My Chemical Romance live. Apparently the moon did too.
There are certain things I expected walking into Coors Field Thursday night: black eyeliner, military jackets, pyro and a few dozen thousand former emo kids discovering that every Gerard Way lyric they memorized in middle school is somehow still occupying valuable real estate in their brains. What I didn’t have on my bingo card was a lunar eclipse rising directly over the stadium while My Chemical Romance performed The Black Parade.
As Thursday night’s show unfolded, the moon slowly climbed above Coors Field and slipped deeper into Earth’s shadow, eventually turning a dark reddish-orange just as MCR transitioned into the second half of its show. Near the eclipse’s peak around 10:12 p.m., roughly 96 percent of the moon was buried in Earth’s shadow. Gerard Way noticed it too, stopping between songs on the B-stage to acknowledge the increasingly ominous-looking moon hanging above the stadium.
For a band that has spent more than two decades turning death, grief and existential dread into something extraordinarily theatrical, the timing was almost too perfect.
Welcome to the Black Parade
Somehow, this was my first time seeing My Chemical Romance. I’ve listened to them since middle school, which meant there was a certain amount of anticipation attached to finally seeing a band whose music has followed me through an increasingly alarming percentage of my life.
I expected a good concert. I wasn’t expecting the scale of what MCR brought to Coors Field.
Calling the current stadium tour simply a “concert” doesn’t quite cover it. For the first half of Thursday night’s show, My Chemical Romance didn’t just perform The Black Parade. They dropped Coors Field into an entire fictional universe built around it, complete with the authoritarian country of Draag, a dictator, soldiers, propaganda, characters, uniforms and even an invented language.
The lore surrounding the production runs deep enough that unless you’ve spent a few evenings investigating MCR fan theories online, you’re probably not going to understand all of it. I certainly didn’t, but that was almost beside the point. What mattered inside Coors Field was how completely committed the band was to the world it had created.
Additional cast members moved throughout the production as actual characters rather than background performers, while a live violinist added another dimension to songs that were already enormous. Way spent much of the performance inhabiting the production rather than simply standing at the center of it as a traditional rock frontman. At one point, someone ran across the stage completely engulfed in flames. An enormous eyeball descended from the ceiling. Way held a human skull. There were explosions, fireworks and enough moving pieces that there was almost always something happening beyond the band itself. And somehow, it all felt cohesive.
When The Black Parade finally reached its end, confetti didn’t explode over the audience for the traditional stadium-rock victory lap. Instead, it slowly fell across the stage like ash as the band disappeared from the enormous production they had just spent the first half of the night creating. The stage looked less like the end of a concert and more like the remains of the world we had just watched unravel.
It was one of the simplest production choices of the night, and easily one of the most effective.
Twenty Years Later, That Piano Note Still Works
Of course, all of that production only works if the music underneath it can carry the weight, and The Black Parade still hits remarkably hard 20 years later.
MCR performed the album front-to-back, beginning with “The End.” into “Dead!” before moving through “This Is How I Disappear” and “The Sharpest Lives.” Then came one of the most recognizable piano notes in rock music.
The opening G note of “Welcome to the Black Parade” hit, and Coors Field absolutely erupted.
I stopped what I was doing for a moment just to take it in. I’ve heard that song more times than I could reasonably count, but hearing it inside a stadium filled with people who had their own decades-long relationship with it was something entirely different. For the beginning of the song, I genuinely couldn’t hear the band. Gerard Way, the guitars and a massive stadium sound system were all being swallowed by tens of thousands of people screaming every single word back toward the stage.
That was probably the moment when the scale of the night really registered for me. This wasn’t a crowd waiting for the handful of songs they remembered from 20 years ago. They sang everything. Choruses, verses, deeper cuts — it barely seemed to matter. Throughout the night, there was almost always someone around you who knew every word.
There’s obviously nostalgia wrapped up in a tour like this, but Thursday night never felt like a band simply cashing in on it. If anything, hearing The Black Parade sequentially was a reminder of how ambitious and strange the album remains. It’s theatrical, dark, occasionally ridiculous, deeply sincere and full of songs that have somehow become communal property for an entire generation.
Then MCR Basically Started Another Concert
After finishing The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance could have walked offstage and sent everyone home happy. Instead, the band essentially started a second concert.
The massive main-stage production disappeared behind them and MCR resurfaced on a smaller B-stage surrounded by fans in the middle of Coors Field. The contrast was immediate. The first half felt like watching My Chemical Romance present a piece of theater; the second felt like getting considerably closer to the band underneath it.
It also made the remainder of the night much less predictable.
Unlike The Black Parade, the B-stage portion changes throughout the tour, giving each city a different collection of songs from MCR’s catalog. Denver got “Boy Division,” “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid,” “Heaven Help Us,” “SING,” “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” “Helena,” “Cemetery Drive,” “Bulletproof Heart” and finally “Na Na Na.”
It’s an impressive second set, particularly because the band didn’t simply stack it with its most obvious hits. “Vampires Will Never Hurt You” reached all the way back to 2002’s I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, while “Boy Division” and “Heaven Help Us” rewarded fans who have spent considerably more time digging through the catalog.
Of course, the obvious favorites still delivered some of the night’s biggest reactions. “I’m Not Okay” and “Helena” instantly turned Coors Field into another massive singalong and proved that, regardless of how much the production around MCR has evolved, these songs haven’t lost much of their ability to connect with the people who grew up with them.
There’s always a little danger in finally seeing a band you’ve listened to for most of your life. Twenty years gives you plenty of time to build expectations that reality has absolutely no obligation to meet. My Chemical Romance exceeded mine.
MCR can bring the enormous eyeball to another city. They can recreate the pyro, the actors, the costumes and the falling ash. But they aren’t getting that moon again. That belonged to Denver and Denver only
