10 Perfect Albums With Dark Backstories

Anyone who's looking to get a wholesome experience out of a My Chemical Romance record has got a lot of learning to do. While every single MCR record before The Black Parade had been centered around the darker side of life, their third outing was going to take everything to the nth degree, creating an all out rock opera centered on one man's journey from getting terminal cancer to either passing away or learning to live with the consequences. That's a lot of darkness to take in all at once though, and the effects really started to show once the band got to the studio.

After a few weeks of getting the basic outline of the songs together, the band began to get haunting visions when staying on the grounds, leading to most of them not sleeping through the night and some of the band members even moving out of the place before the record was even finished. You can even hear Gerard Way talking about some of the problems he was having on the record, with the beginning of Sleep featuring a spoken word recording of him talking about having night terrors while he's sleeping.

The further the album plays on though, you can start to feel that sort of morose feeling second hand, putting some of the epics like Welcome to the Black Parade right next to the absolute horrorshow that creeps up in songs like Mama, which sounds like a Broadway show being performed in the bowels of Hell. The ending of the record might be open ended to the listener, but you'll definitely have more than a few emotional scars by the end of things as well.