Hesitant Alien, Gerard Way's first album outside the confines of My Chemical Romance, belongs to a rare group of solo debuts: instead of opening up a new chapter, it's an interesting footnote in a long career.
Way released Hesitant Alien in September 2014, hot on the heels of the dissolution of My Chemical Romance. After consolidating the success of their major-label debut Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge with 2006's blockbuster The Black Parade, the group buckled under their own weight. Scrapping an entire album they made with producer Brendan O'Brien—it'd come out in 2012 as Conventional Weapons—MCR released Danger Days: The True Lives Of the Fabulous Killjoys, an overstuffed concept album that nevertheless teemed with vitality thanks to an infusion of glammy power-pop. Despite its sonic punch, the group started to fracture on its supporting tour. They attempted to rally for another album in 2012 but it was in vain: the group announced its breakup on March 22, 2013.
During the promotional push for Hesitant Alien, Way confirmed that the scale of My Chemical Romance started to wear on the singer. "There was a large part of me that wanted to escape that bigness, which I came to terms with over time," Way told DIY in 2014, explaining, "At the beginning of the break up, for sure, I was trying to escape this largeness."
Part of that escape involved writing an album that wasn't explicitly a rock opera, a decision that amounted to something of a first for Way. During My Chemical Romance's reign at Reprise Records, each successive album was undergirded by an increasingly elaborate unifying story. Throughout his career with MCR, he'd also channeled his narrative yen into writing for comics. Way's original comic book series, The Umbrella Academy, hit shelves in 2007, and he wrote a tie-in comic for Danger Days that was released in 2012. Around the time Hesitant Alien dropped, he was still going strong with comics, writing a multiverse storyline for the Spider-Man series Edge Of Spider-Verse. It's a narrative trope he's returned to several times through his career; The Umbrella Academy also explores time travel and parallel universes.
Way may not have constructed Hesitant Alien as a concept album, but it certainly is unified conceptually, drawing heavily from glam and '70s art-punk, not to mention '90s revivals of these sounds. The album art explicitly nods at Iggy Pop's hand jive on the cover of The Idiot, the album title can't help but evoke memories of David Bowie's The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. During the promotional interviews for Hesitant Alien, Way repeatedly emphasized how he found inspiration in Britpop, particularly the music of Pulp and Blur.
Concentrate hard enough and it's possible to discern elements of Parklife and Different Class, yet any overt wit gets lost in a rush of fuzz guitars, sci-fi synths, and heavy backbeats. That density is purposeful. Way explained to Riff You, "I actually intentionally made it a little bit sonically muddy. I wanted to make it a bit of a challenge [for people] to understand what was going on." That buzzy, oversaturated sound is one of the chief attributes of Hesitant Alien: it's an album that's vibrant on the surface, switching approaches from song to song. Not quite a collection of singles pumping on an outer space jukebox, the album plays like a midnight transmission from a pirate radio station, where each shift in tone flows intuitively. The over-amplified stomp of "The Bureau" gives way to the insistent pulse of "Action Cat" and the profane, glittery strut of "No Shows," the album's lead single. Often, the '90s touchstones seem far removed from Cool Britannia: The cloistered rhythms and gnarled guitar that propel "Zero Zero" suggest late-stage Pixies, while "How It's Going To Be" is awash in echo that suggests shoegaze. The appealing thing about Hesitant Alien is that while the inspirations can sometimes seem apparent, Way and producer Doug McKean assemble their sounds in a fashion that's hardly reverential; the irreverence can sometimes obscure how the album follows its own internal dream logic.
Records as idiosyncratic as Hesitant Alien often struggle to find listeners, even when they're delivered by a star with as faithful a fanbase as Gerard Way. After debuting at 16 on the Billboard Top 200, it slipped out of the chart after just three weeks, which is better than "No Shows" did on the Modern Rock charts, where it didn't place at all. Way soldiered through, posting on his website at the end of 2016 that he was about to convert a structure into a studio, where he hoped to make some "really weird stuff." He wound up working in a shared space with Doug McKean, with Way taking a break from writing comics to cut loose in the studio every Friday. "Baby You're A Haunted House," a glam-rock track released just in time for Halloween 2018, was followed by the unusually bright, open "Getting Down The Germs" a month later. Promoting the single in November of 2018, Way said the goal was to put out a new song every month, a goal that collapsed after "Dasher," a Christmas single featuring Lydia Night of the Regrettes.
Way stepped away from his solo career in 2019 due to two overwhelming forces: the debut of the Netflix adaptation of The Umbrella Academy and the reunion of My Chemical Romance. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the latter took a while to get off the ground. The band was benched after a solitary Los Angeles gig late in 2019, leaving them to resume the tour in 2022, staying on the road until 2023. By that point, The Umbrella Academy had cultivated a strong following, one that kept the show running through its final season in 2024.
That final season appeared a few weeks after the debut of Paranoid Gardens, a new title for Dark Horse co-created by Way. He's got at least one more volume of The Umbrella Academy on the docket, too, which feels more vital than ever, considering how badly Netflix botched the ending of the TV show. In each of the first three volumes of The Umbrella Academy comics, Way transports his characters to a new setting and timeline. Even in his long-running projects, Way is constantly changing forms, never staying in one spot for long.
The appearance of Paranoid Gardens a few months before the tenth anniversary of Hesitant Alien seemingly confirms that Way isn't set to return to his solo career anytime soon but, in a way, that's fine. The absence of new music from Way leaves Hesitant Alien as a fascinating one-off, a cult record painted on a large, vibrant canvas. In a parallel universe, maybe it could've been a big hit.
