Once upon a time, the Heartbreak Phantoms were the biggest name in pop punk. The last darlings of the emo era, the Boston-based quintet saw a meteoric rise from basement shows on the Berklee campus to sold-out tour stops at TD Garden, and no one — not fans, not critics, not even the Phantoms themselves — could have predicted that just three years into their career, the band would begin to implode with all the grace of a failed stage dive behind the scenes. But now, the Heartbreak Phantoms are ready for their renaissance, and amid their fans' excitement for the upcoming new album and subsequent reunion tour, the band's bassist relives the tensions that broke up the group in the first place — and starts to reshape their troubled past into a triumphant future. Told via text screenshots and fan contributions to a music journal, "Or the Comeback of the Year" combines Fall Out Boy’s hiatus with MCR’s return by way of The Last Five Years, plus a hefty splash of Marianas Trench’s “Dearly Departed." You can read it in issue 2 of Groupie Mag here!
Instead of songs that score the story, this playlist contains the closest analogues of the top 10 Heartbreak Phantoms songs listed in the story's journal article! Fun fact: I originally wrote this piece for the metafiction class I took in the last semester of my MFA program, and in handing it in with a link to this playlist, I achieved my proudest accomplishment to date: inadvertently creating circumstances that resulted in my program director listening to "Welcome to the Black Parade."
Instead of songs that score the story, this playlist contains the closest analogues of the top 10 Heartbreak Phantoms songs listed in the story's journal article! Fun fact: I originally wrote this piece for the metafiction class I took in the last semester of my MFA program, and in handing it in with a link to this playlist, I achieved my proudest accomplishment to date: inadvertently creating circumstances that resulted in my program director listening to "Welcome to the Black Parade."
