Gerard Way’s former band, My Chemical Romance, will always have the dubious honour of being dubbed “the sinister cult of emo” by an outraged Daily Mail. However, the singer’s solo debut blasts off somewhere else entirely. With his trademark red hair now sculpted into a shorter mop of flame, Way is dipping into the music he grew up with – particularly David Bowie circa TVC 15 and the Britpop energy of Suede and Supergrass. Way’s audible enthusiasm for this music results in a confident, swaggering set of songs packed with joie de vivre, banks of feedback and walls of guitars and saxophones. Edgy opener Bureau pairs a Station to Station strut with the sound of a ringing telephone, while No Shows and Brother have stadium-friendly choruses. How It’s Going to Be perhaps takes a wry shot aimed at those who pigeonholed him as dark or goth (“You said we’d all be dead by 25”), but Way is mapping out a different path and presumably hopes to take the band’s massive audience with him.