It’s been about a decade since Twenty One Pilots got here oozing out of Columbus, Ohio, with their resolutely Midwestern, amicably dystopian 2015 hit “Harassed Out,” an emo-rap-industrial-pop slab of sing-songy melancholy that touched sufficient of a nerve to catapult the beforehand unknown duo into Adele/Beyoncé echelons of chart success. Twenty One Pilots’ post-genre sound was well-timed for the complete blossoming of the streaming period. Blurryface (the album that contained “Harassed Out”) went from reggae-lite to ukulele twerpiness to pop-punk to piano-pop to EDM. Including some worth amidst all of the playlist-brained vertigo, additionally they threw in a proggy meta-narrative tailored to maintain true believers locked in, come what might for the band’s industrial future.
Subsequent Pilots albums have tried to channel rapper-singer-songwriter Tyler Joseph and funky, brawny drummer Josh Dun’s diverse sonic tendencies right into a extra coherent imaginative and prescient. 2017’s Trench was darker and rougher and kind of in regards to the wages of fame; 2021’s Scaled & Icy swerved into an unalloyed pop brightness that generally urged Rivers Cuomo doing Billy Joel. Their seventh album, Clancy, arrives on the ninth anniversary of Blurryface and purports to finish the coming-of-age story that started with that breakout LP. Its airtight self-referentiality will reward followers: “I’m Clancy, prodigal son/ Achieved working, provide you with Josh Dun,” Joseph raps speedily over his associate’s fleet drum half on “Overcompensate,” which brings to thoughts Nineties big-beat rocktronica.
The music additionally suggests the summing-up of an extended journey, the identical willful eclecticism now piloted by extra mature studio artistes (together with their go-to co-writer/co-producer Paul Meany, of the band Mutemath). They zip from the Blink-y pump of “Subsequent Semester,” wherein a botched suicide try turns into a second of self-discovery, to the anthemic emo-rap of “Backslide,” to the Killers-size neo-new Wave of “Midwest Indigo,” to the trippy buoyancy of “Lavish.” But the cumulative consequence by no means feels as jarring or scattered as such a jumble may counsel.
When Twenty One Pilots broke via with “Harassed Out,” that they had their finger on the expertise of younger individuals attempting to find an genuine self in an period of micro-managed drugs and psychological wellness jargon. Right here they usually appear to be updating that dislocated feeling via a middle-aged lens. “I requested counsel with the counselor/And he canceled twice,” Joseph sings on “Midwest Indigo,” the place coping with winter is deployed as a metaphor for struggling via a frozen relationship. The synth-rock spotlight “Navigating” laments the passing of a grandmother for example of “feeling the truth that everyone leaves.”
Essentially the most on-the-nose of those songs is “Oldies Station,” which brings to thoughts Ben Folds doing Eighties synth-pop, as Joseph sings about having “nothing within the tank in a season of classes realized in giving up.” The answer? “Push on via,” he sings, including that should you do you may get to take pleasure in stuff like listening to a music you want whereas ready at a pink mild and/or attending your daughter’s first dance recital. That push-through strategy to emotional readability might not work for everybody, however the music’s kinda-corny, undeniably candy tone provides it a valedictory really feel nonetheless — one thing to maintain a sure pressure of dude hanging in there throughout his subsequent Ohio winter of the soul.
