My Chemical Romance, Louder Than Life 2026
LIVE REVIEW: A beheading. An operatic turn from an unexpected source.
Magic tricks. Knighting ceremonies. Fire, and lots of it.
There are some things that have come to be expected from My Chemical Romance in their time reinterpreting the world of The Black Parade over the last year or so, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have endless surprises up their sleeves at every turn.
And their appearance at Louder Than Life feels like one of the most prominent culminations of the spellbindingly deadly narrative that has unfolded within the nation of Draag, allowing their performance of these iconic, influential, timeless songs to feel heightened, too.
Gerard Way stalks his way through a gritty ‘The Sharpest Lives’ and throat-shredding ‘Mama’, ruby blood splattered across his face from a graphic and fatal encounter with a soldier ahead of ‘Cancer’, whilst the deep sentiments at the core of ‘Sleep’ and ‘Disenchanted’ feel all the more poignant at this point in their journey, with Frank Iero, Mikey Way and Ray Toro clearly feeling every dramatic chord and tear-stained refrain.
By the time ‘I’m Not Okay’, ‘Na Na Na’ and ‘Helena’, as well as a nice rollout for ‘Danger Days’ b-side ‘Zero Percent’, are rolled out as an evening ender, their place still at the head of the table, bigger, bolder and braver than the rest of the bunch, is even more ironclad.
As we approach the end of this sensational run and the prospect of whatever comes next reaches boiling point, nights like this cement why MCR remain the force of nature they are.
Because they do things that others wouldn’t even consider. They reward you for trusting their process. They go the extra mile, just because they can.
And as long as that passion and purpose stay at the forefront, then nobody is even going to get close to them any time soon.
✏️ Jack Rogers
📷 Steve Thrasher
A quarter of a million badgers were shot in England over thirteen years to control bovine TB.
In a single twelve-month stretch, the testing regime slaughtered 22,934 cattle.
Thirteen years of national argument, and all of it was about the smaller number.
Clarkson's Farm gave one of the larger number a face. She failed a routine test last July, was pregnant with twins, was taken off her calf, and was destroyed. The bull's result came back inconclusive. Farm shut, nothing in or out for two months, because that is how long you wait before you may test again.
Here is what the vet actually did to her.
Clipped two patches of hair on her neck, one above the other. Measured the skin at each with a pair of callipers. Avian tuberculin into the top patch, bovine tuberculin into the bottom. Then he left, and came back seventy-two hours later, and measured the same two patches again.
Take the swelling at the bovine site. Subtract the swelling at the avian site. Four millimetres or more and she is a reactor, and a reactor is destroyed.
Four millimetres. The thickness of a pound coin.
Notice what that test is not doing. It is not finding the bacterium. It is not looking at her lungs. It asks her immune system which tuberculosis it recognises more strongly, the cattle sort or the bird sort, and reads the answer off her neck as a lump. A cow can be riddled with it and barely reply. A cow can reply loudly and be carrying nothing at all. Her breeding changes how loudly she answers.
It is essentially the instrument Koch handed the world in 1890. The target for a TB-free England is 2038.
Every argument you have ever heard about bovine TB was about the animal in the hedge. Not one of them was about the pound coin.
¿Sabías que en 1930 se estrenó un "slasher" protagonizado únicamente por perros?
WHO KILLED ROVER? es un cortometraje de 15 minutos donde todos los personajes son perros vestidos como humanos, caminando sobre dos patas y resolviendo un asesinato.
Lots of people trying to guess what Alley Cats is like from the trailer. It's hard to describe. You have to see it. Don't think it's a cold, edgy, offensive weirdo animation though. It's not. It's more like a cross between a sitcom and a Pixar movie. But with swearing.