My Chemical Romance invented a new language, and fans have already made a Wordle

Keposhka is the language of the fictional land of Draag, which the band conjured for their Love Live The Black Parade tour.

By Emma Keates | September 12, 2025 | 5:08pm

Screenshot: My Chemical Romance/YouTube

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My Chemical Romance invented a new language, and fans have already made a Wordle

My Chemical Romance has never skimped on the details. In 2007, the band toured exclusively as their fictional alter-egos The Black Parade in support of that seminal concept album, which told a grand tale of a dying cancer patient and a fictional, marching band-filled afterlife. 2010’s apocalyptic Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys saw a whole new set of alter-egos and a companion comic series penned by Shaun Simon and frontman Gerard Way to boot. The band was on hiatus from 2013 through 2019, but all those years away didn’t dampen this particular inclination. In fact, they only seem to have made it stronger.

MCR is currently on the road for their Long Live The Black Parade tour, which sees them play the entirety of The Black Parade plus a few cuts from the rest of their catalogue each night. (Check out Paste‘s review of their New Jersey show here.) But this isn’t just any old nostalgia tour. The band could have dusted off those black jackets, but instead, they came up with an entirely new tale about a fictional land called Draag suffering under the influence of a Grand Immortal Dictator. Draag has its own national anthem, fans vote on whether or not to “execute” a group of masked “prisoners” between songs, and, like any good fictional nation, it has its own language. (This is all for a tour mind you—not even a new album.)

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Keposhka, the language, has been everywhere at these shows from the very first stop earlier this summer. The washing instructions for the tour’s t-shirts are even written in it. Anyone who bought one at one of the early stops and wanted to know whether or not it could go in the dryer was S.O.L., however. The language’s characters look vaguely Cyrillic, but they’re completely made up. The band never provided any sort of easily discernable key. “When Gerard [Way] first emailed me about this MCR tour, he said he wanted a language for it that felt oppressive, but brand new,” said Nate Piekos, the designer who created Keposhka, in an interview with Kerrang. “He didn’t want to use an existing language that people could easily figure out: the universe should have its own language.”

Of course, MCR’s fans are well aware of the band’s antics at this point and immediately took to social media to work on decoding it. A dedicated subreddit was born, and through a variety of context clues, people eventually pieced the whole thing together. There’s now a fan-made English to Keposhka translator online, if you want to see it spit out your name. For experts, there’s an entirely Keposhka Wordle, also fan-made. (This writer has tried to solve it a few times. It is, unsurprisingly, extremely challenging.)

Fans have been waiting for a new MCR album for 15 years. It’s still unclear if that will ever happen, but this has certainly been a fun distraction in the meantime.

Courtesy of Keposhka Translator.

(That’s “Goodbye” in Keposhka.)