How far would you go to listen to new music by your favorite band? Would you download and share unreleased leaked songs?
The alternative rock band My Chemical Romance has not released a studio album since 2010. Despite their lack of credits or their decent-for-their-genre chart numbers, MCR has a prolific and caring fan base that has only grown larger. For the last 16 years, MCR’s fans have been conspiring about the release of their next project, commonly theorizing about the elusive “MCR5.” The fans’ main fixation is “The Paper Kingdom.”
“The Paper Kingdom” was the tentative title for the unreleased fifth album by MCR. Written and recorded in 2012, the album was ultimately scrapped just before the band’s breakup in 2013.
The band described the project as a darker and gloomier-sounding album; members of the band even cited the project as being one of the reasons for their breakup.
The only officially released piece of this project, “Fake Your Death,” was long believed to be the band’s final song. “Fake Your Death” was the only new track featured on “May Death Never Stop You,” MCR’s 2014 greatest hits album.
Since then, the band released a single in 2022 called “The Foundations of Decay.” “Foundations” is the only officially released song from the band in the last decade; meanwhile, the fan base has only grown and grown.
When MCR was broken up, fans consistently theorized that everything being released officially by the band’s social media or by the band members was an MCR reunion announcement. After the band reunited, fans moved to theorizing that everything released by the band was about an upcoming album — “The Paper Kingdom” or otherwise.
In October 2019, the band announced that they were reuniting, and a reunion show was to take place that December. This was one of the first instances of fans suggesting the release of “The Paper Kingdom.”
Outlined in an Alt Press article, fans theorized that the imagery the band released for the reunion show had to be for something more comprehensive than a concert, leading some fans to believe the imagery was a reference to an upcoming release of “The Paper Kingdom.”
This theory extended to the next announcement released by the band, too. On Jan. 19, 2020, MCR put out a video titled “An Offering…” that followed the story of a devout MCR fan traveling through the band’s different eras before landing somewhere new. It ended with a tour announcement for a full U.S. tour with a few festival dates in Australia and Japan.
Fans also thought that this had to be more than just a tour announcement, perhaps a new album, or even, possibly, the release of “The Paper Kingdom.” But it was just a reunion tour.
Much later, in 2024, MCR once again announced a new tour, this time with a new conceptual video and a new set of visuals that weren’t related to any existing MCR era. Fans theorized that this would be a new album, or maybe even the release of “The Paper Kingdom.” (The cycle kept repeating itself.) None of these announcements was ultimately more than notifying fans of tours to come, and “The Paper Kingdom” was never released.
But what was “The Paper Kingdom” originally meant to be?
In 2012, the band went on record in numerous interviews and articles to talk about “The Paper Kingdoms” as an upcoming project.
In a 2017 podcast with Andrew Greenwald, frontman Gerard Way discussed “The Paper Kingdom” and provided an explanation for the concept album: It’s the story of two people in a support group for parents who have lost a child. To cope with their loss, these two parents believe a fictitious story about their child being abducted by a witch.
In a 2014 interview, Way spoke about “The Paper Kingdom” as a product of both the poor reception of their fourth studio album, “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys,” as well as his declining mental health. He said the darker energy in “The Paper Kingdom” was something that he “had to walk away from.”
Prior to the band’s breakup, before all of the postmortem interviews and reunion concerts, the band teased “The Paper Kingdom” and talked it up just like any other album. In a 2012 interview with Noise 11, guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro discussed the production of this album. Iero said, “It can’t just be a collection of songs. It’s never going to be, ‘Oh, we had these 12 songs, so record it real quick, and we’ll put them out.’ I don’t think anyone can really do that these days anymore without some sort of thought or vision behind it.”
In a 2012 Facebook post, the band posted cryptic photos of a whiteboard with songwriting notes, teasing the new project. In a 2012 interview with The Aquarian, Iero talked about “The Paper Kingdom”’s progress, saying the album would be ready to start recording in “maybe a month.”
Even non-MCR band members talked about their upcoming project. Matt Devine, frontman of the band Kill Hannah, mentioned “The Paper Kingdom” in a 2013 Kerrang interview, just days before MCR broke up.
“I’ve heard four new songs. It’s exactly in line for what I think My Chem fans will be thrilled to hear, but at the same time it really marks what I think will be a new direction for [the band],” said Devine.
But the album never came out.
So if there were four songs finished enough for Devine to hear, and the album had a concept, and the band had already done a great deal of reporting, why was “The Paper Kingdom” never released, even as a set of demos?
There isn’t an easy answer. The band hasn’t said more about “The Paper Kingdom” aside from confirming that it existed, they were making it, and it was dark.
Some fans speculate that the band would never release a finished version of the project because their longtime producer and good friend Doug McKean unexpectedly passed away in June 2022. However, McKean’s passing doesn’t explain why the band never tried to release a fully finished version of “The Paper Kingdom” before 2022, or why they couldn’t release a set of unfinished demos now.
MCR has been known to release demos of their unfinished work from time to time, like their 2016 “Living with Ghosts” re-release of the 2006 album “The Black Parade” that featured versions of the album’s demos, as well as demos for songs that were never released.
The band also put out what they called the “Attic Demos,” which were original demos from their first album “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” on the “May Death Never Stop You” greatest hits album, for the songs “Skylines and Turnstiles,” “Our Lady of Sorrows” (named “Knives/Sorrows” in the demo version), and “Cubicles.”
They also released selections from a different scrapped album. In 2009, the band wrote and recorded an album tentatively titled, “Conventional Weapons.” The project was never finished; nevertheless, beginning in October 2012, the band released its demos in sets of two. They continued to release these song pairs until February 2013, when they put out the final set, making 10 songs in total.
Unlike “Conventional Weapons,” it was not the band that kept “The Paper Kingdom” from fading away. It was their fanbase.
In 2022, Reddit user Excalibur made a number of posts claiming he had all of “The Paper Kingdom” demos and that he wanted to sell them for $10,000. He released snippets of songs titled “Witch” and “Paper Swords,” and fans shared them across social media, reveling in the new MCR content.
This marked the beginning of an ongoing conversation about the ethics of listening to, talking about, and generally taking an interest in “The Paper Kingdom,” as well as the public’s knowledge that “The Paper Kingdom”’s demos really did exist. It became a bit of an emo internet urban legend.
It was during their 2025 tour that MCR first acknowledged another “Paper Kingdom” song. They played the song “War Beneath the Rain” — a scrapped “The Paper Kingdom” song — live during three of their shows.
On Feb. 1, 2026, a majority of “The Paper Kingdom” was released on the Internet Archive. Up until that day, song leaks from “The Paper Kingdom” were confined to snippets shared between small groups, and largely existed on websites entirely built around leaking music. This was the first publicly available and comprehensive set of demos for “The Paper Kingdom.”
The leaked demos consisted of 16 tracks, most of which were entirely new to the public. (“Fake Your Death,” “War Beneath the Rain,” and “Witch” had been previously released. “Witch” was put out after an alleged and lengthy dispute between leakers over “scamming.”) With this set of new songs came a wave of backlash from fans who believed the band hadn’t wanted anyone to listen to the project.
The initial leak on the Internet Archive was taken down after a few days, and any discussion about the leaks on the MCR subreddit or any other MCR forums has been taken down.
A few days after the initial leak of the album came two more leaked songs, “Into Your Arms” and “Stars Align,” both also scrapped demos from “The Paper Kingdom.” Two days after “Into Your Arms” was leaked, another set of three songs, “Eggman,” “Wednesday,” and “Watching the World” leaked, with claims that these were also demos from “The Paper Kingdom.”
As a response to the leaks, there has been a continuing conversation about the ethics of listening to the leaks. Fans have wanted these for years, the songs have been teased and talked about, and in some instances, sung live. Even so, this first actual listen through a majority of the album has been an under-the-table, unsteady path that some fans refuse to partake in.
As the conversation continues, there have been some counterarguments. Reddit and TikTok users have argued that these demos will drum up more hype for the band and reinvigorate the fanbase. But there hasn’t been a consensus about whether or not the community thinks it’s okay to listen to the leaks.
Regardless of the ethics, the leaks were not how the band anticipated returning to this album. This was not how “The Paper Kingdom” was meant to come out. But, potentially, this could be an end to the overwhelming anticipation from MCR fans for “MCR5.” So the question remains: Are you willing to listen to the album?
