My Chemical Romance's 2006 concept album combined punk, glam and Broadway. As the band ends a hiatus, we look back at the music that fueled it — and was inspired by it.

In 2006, a gaggle of Jersey boys obsessed with horror movies, comic books and death made an audacious piece of goth-punk Broadway. “The Black Parade,” the third album by My Chemical Romance, was a full-fledged rock opera — the type of shameless, pretentious statement that punk was ostensibly created to destroy. Fueled by the Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd and a bunch of ’70s and ’80s movie musicals, MCR made “The Wall” for the era of black eyeliner and body piercing.

The emo-pop heartthrobs had spent the better part of two years riding the runaway success of their 2004 album “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge”: They brooded on magazine covers, flailed on MTV’s “Total Request Live” and conquered the Warped Tour. Instead of cashing in with another set of morbid pop-punk anthems, My Chemical Romance — the brothers Gerard (vocals) and Mikey Way (bass), Bob Bryar (drums), Frank Iero (guitar) and Ray Toro (guitar) — attempted to make something more ambitious and timeless.

The group recruited Rob Cavallo, who had experience producing both Green Day and “Rent.” It concocted a complex, deeply personal story line about an ailing young hero named the Patient and sang ballads with lines like “Baby, I’m just soggy from the chemo.” They wore marching band uniforms that looked like Tim Burton art-directing “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” In a much repeated metaphor for the entire theatrical, daring endeavor, they got Liza Minnelli to sing on it. The album went triple platinum.

The era of emo-pop dominance ended shortly after. MCR rebooted once again as a post-apocalyptic glam-prog group for the 2010 LP “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys,” then broke up three years later. (The band will play its first show in seven years Dec. 20 in Los Angeles.) Its legacy lives on, not only in contemporary emo bands, but in the young rappers, metalcore bands and genre-hopping pop musicians who grew up nodding along with the Black Parade’s grand marshals.

Here’s an audio guide to the album’s songs, plus what came before, and what came after.