The ultimate monitor on Twenty One Pilots‘ most-recent album, 2021’s ‘Scaled and Icy’, stood aside from the others, and in interviews, frontman Tyler Joseph urged it supplied a touch as to the place the band had been heading subsequent. This kind of breadcrumb path is catnip to the duo’s long-time followers; their diehard followers, who name themselves the Skeleton Clique, have gained awards for his or her dedication to unspooling the tightly-wound narrative threads that Joseph and bandmate Josh Dun weave by means of their albums.
That music, ‘Redecorate’, can even have happy followers caught off-guard by that file’s unusually sunny disposition, with the Pilots having taken a post-pandemic flip away from the claustrophobic really feel and conceptual nature of their earlier albums. ‘Redecorate’ was ruminative, atmospheric and, as we now know, would lead into this seventh album ‘Clancy’, which concludes a story arc that started on 2018’s ‘Trench’. We comply with the titular character as he makes an attempt to flee a fictional dystopia known as Dema. He had been sidelined on ‘Scaled and Icy’, the title of which is an anagram of “Clancy is lifeless”.
It’s head-spinning stuff, and begs a primary query, which is as to why Twenty One Pilots don’t attempt for a similar sophistication of their sound as they do of their thematic world-building. Theirs is a radio-friendly, electronically-tinged mix of rock and rap that fills arenas and places up enormous streaming numbers, however that had not matured in any possible way till ‘Trench’, when out of the blue there was a renewed urgency that manifested itself in searing riffs and towering choruses.
‘Scaled and Icy’’s veer off into upbeat pop felt like a step backwards, one which the band are struggling to shake on Clancy. The nervy environment promised by ‘Redecorate’ materialises on moody opener ‘Overcompensate’, one of many few actual highlights right here, however fails to maintain itself. As a substitute, the pair lapse right into a sonic breeziness on the likes of ‘Backslide’ and ‘Vignette’ that works towards the heaviness of the lyrics; self-doubt and self-excoriation are again on the menu after ‘Scaled and Icy’. The file fares higher when it shoots for real experimentation, like on the bizarre, spacey ‘Lavish’; in any other case, ‘Clancy’ is as a rule the sound of a band spinning their wheels, caught in a wierd house the place their vibrant conceptual concepts are being painted from a beige musical palette.
Particulars
- Launch date: Could 24, 2024
- Document label: Atlantic
