It’s 12th February 2011, two days before my 14th birthday, and I’m at my first gig. I am, specifically, high in the rafters of Wembley Arena watching My Chemical Romance. The band are touring their fourth album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, but the biggest crowd reaction by far is for an 11-note piano riff that echoes through the vast building: the beginning of “Welcome to the Black Parade”.

Then, the steady drumbeat of a marching band comes in, anchoring the song until a huge drum fill brings in a faster middle section. Two-thirds in, it slows down again, and that marching beat resumes, eventually becoming the solitary sound which leads the song out. “Welcome to the Black Parade” was the lead single of The Black Parade, the band’s grand 2006 concept album about the life (and afterlife) of a man with terminal cancer. The drummer who played on it was Bob Bryar, who was in the band from 2004 to 2010, and has just died aged 44.

The Black Parade was one of emo rock’s commercial high points. It went to number two in the US and UK, and has since gone triple platinum in both countries; “Welcome to the Black Parade” topped the UK singles chart in October 2006, dethroning (in a very 2000s moment) Razorlight’s “America”. Emo’s lurch into the mainstream led to an unsurprising backlash: the genre’s bleakness, and an insistent idea that it supposedly encouraged suicide, meant My Chemical Romance was branded a “sinister cult” by the Daily Mail.

Every vaguely angsty teenager of the time had the piano opening of “Welcome to the Black Parade” etched into their brain. Though I was a few years too young to listen to The Black Parade when it came out, I did too after I caught up. The sincerity and high emotional pitch of the band, with Gerard Way singing (sometimes screaming) his heart out on every song, fitted the emotional intensity of adolescence like a black leather glove.

The Black Parade was a turning point in the band's evolution. My Chemical Romance still had a streak of the heavy, screamy sound from their first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. From their second, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, they also added hooks and melody, with songs like “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” showing off that dark-but-catchy vibe

On The Black Parade, they enlarged their canvas even further, bringing in the grand themes and song structures of Queen and Pink Floyd. The experiment worked: along with the anthemic “Welcome to the Black Parade”, there’s horror rock (“The Sharpest Lives”), ballads (“I Don’t Love You”, “Cancer”), a vaudeville-style hidden track at the end (“Blood”), and a self-aware riff on how some adults viewed their audience (“Teenagers”).

Next year, My Chemical Romance are going on a 10-date stadium tour of North America, where they’ll play The Black Parade in full, with added resonance in the wake of Bryar's death. It’s a big, intricate album – as I discovered firsthand, when trying to learn its guitar parts – and it’s held up. Listening to it years later, free from most of the fog of my teenage years, the songs are sharp, and still provoke twinges of emotion. “We wanted to make a record you could pass down,” My Chemical Romance guitarist Ray Toro said of The Black Parade when it was released. On that, it’s probably too early to tell, but it’s certainly survived its original audience growing up.