My Chemical Romance give up the emo woe

NO MORE angst. No more whingeing. No more playing the victim. When My Chemical Romance re-emerge in early 2010 with their fourth album, any trace of "woe is me and it's all your fault" will be replaced by such self-aware and self-sufficient themes as "strength" and "self-preservation".

Yup, emo is dead. Long live My Chemical Romance.

"I didn't want to set kids who like to wear black back 20 years, that wasn't the point. Because it's taken us so long to be able to wear black every day."

Gerard Way lets out a laugh. The singer is standing outside Sunset Sound Studios in LA, where his band is in the final stages of mixing the new, as-yet-untitled album with producer Brendan O'Brien.

"But I guess if you're gonna dress like you listen to The Cure all the time, you're gonna get s... for it."

Way wasn't happy with reports that black-clad kids were getting beat up when the band played at Big Day Out in 2007. And he describes hate crimes aimed at emo kids with asymmetrical fringes that swept across Mexico in early 2008 as "a human rights issue".

"It literally didn't make any sense to me," Way says. "It all boils down to macho versus emotional at the end of the day. It comes down to gutteral, violent tendencies versus talking about your problems."

But mostly, Way wasn't happy when he thought ahead to what his daughter, Bandit Lee, born in May this year, might think when she picked up My Chemical Romance's previous album, The Black Parade, and gave it a spin as a teen. Would she see her dad and his bandmates as moaning victims?

"I didn't feel that we were," Way clarifies.

"I always felt there was a great deal of black humour with anything we were doing. But I did feel it was misperceived and misinterpreted, and in really strange ways. That's the thing though, when you put a song out there, it's no longer yours, it's somebody else's, and it's theirs to interpret however they want.

"But I knew the power the band had was whatever we put out next, so we could dictate what we were saying, we could dictate how it's perceived to a point."

My Chem 4.0, he swears, will be "very explicitly saying that we're all not victims".

Way, his bassist brother Mikey, guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero and drummer Bob Bryar began pre-production on the new album in February.

"We started from absolutely zero, we didn't bring any road songs into the room," Way says.

Time is a luxury the band have never afforded themselves before, and Way says the all-the-time-we-need edict will carry over to artwork and everything else that must be done for the album.

Songs so far (though the titles may change) include Still Alive, Trans Am, Death Before Disco, The Only Hope For Me Is You, Black Dragon Fighting Society, Kiss The Ring, Boy Division and the marvellously named Save Yourself, I'll Hold Them Back.

Way says every track is a "first-listen song"; something that will grab you from the get-go.

"That was why it took so long, because if something wasn't making you feel that feeling, then it went away and it had to be replaced with something that did make you feel special," he says.

Australia will be first to hear the new songs when My Chemical Romance tour in February for the Soundwave festival, though the album won't be released until March.

Another thing you won't find on the new album is the conceptual pomp and the striking costumery that helped send The Black Parade to platinum status in Australia, Britain and the US.

"Let's swap the word theatrical for cinematic this time," he says. "If Black Parade was a big rock show that was full of theatricality, then this is more of a movie moment. I don't think this band will ever lose any kind of aesthetic or art to it - that always has to be there. It just means that we're not doing what we've always done; it doesn't mean there won't be anything exciting attached to this record."

Though musically shorter and sharper, Way is cautious of using the term "stripped back".

"If anything is stripped back, it's bells and whistles and marching bands and things like that. Songs are now under four minutes or maybe even shorter. That, to me, is stripping it back, trimming the fat, trimming any kind of indulgence out of the music."