"Why not dream big?" - Twenty One Pilots are shaking things up
Twenty One Pilots are one of the biggest bands on the planet, and yet still have the mysterious edge of a cult concern. Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun explain why they’re still aiming high.
Their 2015 album, ‘Blurryface’ took Twenty One Pilots from scrappy, scene-less outsiders to global megastars with a breakneck velocity. A magpie nest of sounds, styles and influences, its fourteen tracks could only exist in a world where streaming is king, and even then, its devil-may-care attitude for genre makes for a jarring first impression. But something about its vibrant, stylistic swathes and vulnerable, lyrical bloodletting connected with the world at large.
By the time the touring cycle for it wound down, the band had won a Grammy (and collected it in their pants, making good on youthful promises) smashed streaming records, infiltrated radio, Hollywood and beyond. Even our parents know the words to ‘Stressed Out’. Their fans, the clique, are so invested, they know Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun’s feelings about bananas (they hate them, and rightly so) and the internet is full of compilations of the band being sassy, falling over or laughing. Songs soundtrack life-defining moments. Lyrics help make sense of an ever-shifting surrounding. It’s the sort of devotion that only the brightest, boldest and most brilliant bands can inspire.
“It’s not until we look back on it, that we realise what was happening,” starts Tyler. “We kept our heads down and just kept grinding and playing every day. It’s like when you don’t see a nephew for a long time; you realise he grew up, and he got taller, but if you were to live with him and watch him grow a fraction of an inch every single day, it doesn’t feel that dramatic. We just didn’t feel how gigantic everything got for us doing that touring cycle. It’s not until we look back on it after having a little bit of a break that we realised how special it was.”
Despite the ever-churning chaos around them, Twenty One Pilots never got caught up or swept away. “Josh and I have never lived a moment of our lives that’s out of control.”
He feels like he has something to prove “all the time,” but that’s ok.
Locking himself away in his home studio, Tyler started fleshing out their next step in secret.
Twenty One Pilots were officially quiet for a year before they threw the sheets back, arms aloft, and welcomed the world to latest album ‘Trench’ with the one-two hammer blow of ‘Jumpsuit’ and ‘Levitate’. No posters, no countdowns, no obvious teases; the band didn’t need to shout about their imminent return. They’d already let the clique know what was coming. Sorta.
‘Trench’ doesn’t concern itself with trying to reach further. There are no pandering arena rock songs, ‘Stressed Out The Sequel’ or tracks purpose-built for radio. “Blurryface’ was created on the road, with those big live moments in their mind’s eye. ‘Trench’ was created in isolation.
From their first show back, A Complete Diversion at Brixton Academy to tonight, their capacity crowd wears their colour proudly. Yellow tape has bordered ‘Trench’ from the start.
It also allows people to get involved easily and without much cost. There’s no barrier for entry with the clique, but that doesn’t mean everything is shared on a silver platter. As ‘Heathens’ warns, “We don’t deal with outsiders very well.” ‘Trench’ is a masterpiece and the tightly knit threads aren’t meant to be picked apart with ease.
The meaning behind the choice of the title is, “super complex,” according to Tyler. “It’s a world. We tried to create something that people can dive into and find themselves inside of,” while the vulture on the front cover is “an important part of the record, but it’s hard to describe really. It’s hard to dive specifically into the branding decisions and symbolism inside the record. You almost have to just come to a show or dive into the record yourself to figure out what it means.”
‘Blurryface’ saw Twenty One Pilots create a life. Full of personality, the titular figure was a symbol of anxiety, insecurity and depression in a bare-knuckle fight of heart, mind and eventual peace. The more you know about him, the more control you have
‘Trench’ takes things even further. There’s a whole world to explore, wild terrain surrounding the looming city of Dema and within that, a story to discover. There are characters to question and a dirt path to feel underfoot. It crafts belonging, despite its transient nature.
“’Trench’ represents the place between two places. Where you’re from and where you should be,” explains Tyler. “We wrote it from the perspective of someone who felt like they needed to leave. There are a lot of times people can find themselves in a spot where they know they should leave where they’re from, but they don’t know where they should go, or how to get there.
Simplified to the extreme, the story focuses on the city of Dema, its ruling class of nine Bishops and the rebellious Banditos, who want to help people break free. It’s a concept record, deliberate and full of detail, but you don’t need a manual to connect to the restless soul of the record. You don’t need to know who Nico is to understand the anxiety of the everyday. You don’t need to stand alongside Clancy to know what it means to feel alone. The questions of faith, trust and belief that are asked in ‘Trench’, plague this world as well.
“We wanted to make sure the story was there. However deep people wanted to go, it was there. We felt like it was important to build something that had a lot of depth,” Tyler shares. “We wanted to create something that was a little more narrow and focused. Maybe it doesn’t have as wide of a reach as a lot of albums do but inside that focus was something very deep. It’s something people could dive into, get lost in and learn from. It’s very multi-faceted. We felt it was important to have a record like that, coming off of a record like ‘Blurryface’.”
The big-picture question of how important what Twenty One Pilots are doing is isn’t something the band entertain though.
But that doesn’t diminish the impact Twenty One Pilots have had. From the very beginning, they’ve tackled uneasy questions with neon warpaint. It started with the very first song Tyler wrote.
From there, things took shape. There’s the confessional ‘Addict With A Pen’, the destructive energy diversion of ‘Guns For Hands’, the search for truth in ‘Trees’ and ‘Migraine’, which admits that something feels wrong in the hope that they’re not alone. Elsewhere, ‘Blurryface’ deals with the suffocating feelings of insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. To have such personal, vulnerable songs connect with a mass audience was “a bit of a shock” for Tyler.
That understanding made it easier for Tyler to tear deeper into himself with ‘Trench’, but “we didn’t start playing shows because we wanted to make everyone feel like they were understood,” he explains. “We stumbled into people feeling that way; it’s more authentic that way. We’ll always write from a perspective of wanting to talk about what we’re going through and if people want to meet us there, they can. But for us to actively pursue where other people are, I feel like it would just lessen the impact of what it is that we’re trying to say. It could potentially come across as reaching.”
“I felt like it was a very important song on the record. We very intentionally put it right smack bang in the middle. Josh and I thought about the lyrical content and the points made in there for a long while. That song was very carefully crafted because we talk about something very serious.
Twenty One Pilots’ discography is littered with songs acknowledging suicide and resolving to carry on. ‘Neon Gravestones’ is the first time Tyler has admitted he could lose this battle with himself, though. It’s the most direct he’s been with feelings of self-destruction.
“The art of songwriting is constantly wrestling with the idea of trying to come up with words that represent other ideas. You know, taking it a little more metaphorically. It’s not that it’s rooted in a fear of saying what it is, it’s about saying it in a different way or saying it in a more creative way.
“As a songwriter, you get excited about trying to come up with a new metaphor, a new way to shine a light or take a different angle on a topic that’s probably been talked about many, many times in the history of songwriting. But then there are other songs where you just know you don’t want to misrepresent the topic that you’re talking about. It makes more sense to be more black and white about it.
“I wouldn’t say we feel a responsibility to talk about these topics,” continues Tyler. “It doesn’t feel like the right word. I mean, we can’t not be affected by the people around us, our fans, their stories and the lives they lead.
The record asks questions it doesn’t necessarily have answers to. Rather than a solid conclusion or a known destination ‘Leave The City’ ends with the resolution to carry on.
For anyone else feeling unsure, lost or misplaced, it offers understanding in that call with no response. It wasn’t done knowingly, though.
“Anyone who sets out to tell everyone that ‘I understand you’ can fall very, very short. If anything, we were trying to talk about something that maybe not a lot of people would understand,” reasons Tyler.
“That’s when there’s power in people finding something to relate to. That’s when they feel like they have a comrade, someone who’s gone through something similar to them. That’s what’s powerful.
“We feel like it made sense to provide a sense of community if someone wanted to be a part of it,” Tyler continues. “More than anything, we were influenced by the live show, what we feel on stage and the people that we’re looking at when we play. There’s a lot of that sense of community in the record just because we’ve been playing shows for so long now and developed that with our fans.
“That’s not something that we chased after or forced, it just kind of happened. There’s a power in people gathering together and celebrating the fact that they’re all there. That’s why the live shows are so important. It’s more powerful than just that moment in time. It can resonate through their lives beyond that.
“The more we travel, talk to people and hear their stories, we see first hand that people are on the same page as us,” adds Josh. “It’s something we never really expected or even necessarily put out to feel.
Taken from the April edition of Dork. Order a copy below. Twenty One Pilots will be back to headline Reading & Leeds this August.
Words: Ali Shutler
You see, in the months leading up to ‘Trench’s unveiling, Twenty One Pilots and their fanbase had been locked in an intense, mysterious game of cat and mouse. Through hidden websites and letters from someone called Clancy who was a prisoner in the mysterious city of Dema, a story of intrigue, escape and wonder was slowly being discovered. There was never a reward for figuring out the next chapter, no pat on the back or peek behind the curtain but with the unveiling of ‘Trench’, it was obvious it was all connected.
‘Trench’ doesn’t concern itself with trying to reach further. There are no pandering arena rock songs, ‘Stressed Out The Sequel’ or tracks purpose-built for radio. “Blurryface’ was created on the road, with those big live moments in their mind’s eye. ‘Trench’ was created in isolation.
