In 2015, Ohio duo Twenty One Pilots broke through with a mix of nasally rap, faux reggae, and sentimental alt-rock that left audiences exclaiming: Who are these watered-down Linkin Park/311 hybrids, and where are their pants? Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Joseph and drummer Josh Dun positioned themselves as defiantly uncool music for “the few, the proud, and the emotional.” Their high-concept nonsense and faith-influenced introspection were tailor-made for dorky high schoolers searching for their place in the world. The angsty, sheltered attitude of lines like “I wasn’t raised in the hood, but I know a thing or two about pain and darkness,” off “Lane Boy,” made the band an easy punching bag, but the sincere attempt at reckoning with mental illness garnered a fanbase nicknamed “the Skeleton Clique,” years before therapyspeak became common pop parlance. Charitably, Pilots could be a gateway to more sophisticated rap and alternative selections; less charitably, they made music for the easily impressed.
But when the Chainsmokers get in their feelings or Sleep Token’s album goes to No. 1, it’s Joseph and Dun’s footprints in the sand. They were also a formative favorite of Billie Eilish, and Turnstile tapped Pilots engineer Adam Hawkins to work on their records. Starting with 2018’s Trench, Joseph shifted to a more detailed, atmospheric sound with Paul Meany of 2000s rock band Mutemath. He even matured as a lyricist, culminating in songs like last year’s single “Next Semester,” which methodically trickled out details of a suicide attempt: “I remember/I remember certain things/What I was wearing/The yellow dashes in the street.”
That brings us to Breach, the eighth Pilots album and the final chapter in a complicated narrative plot encompassing nearly their entire career. To summarize: Main character Clancy tries to escape the city of Dema, but the evil Bishops always drag him back. Clancy joins the Banditos, basically a stand-in for the Skeleton Clique, and they work together to resist the Bishops. The idea is that healing is not linear; the rest is dystopian-YA window dressing. On Breach, Clancy faces off for the last time against Bishops leader Blurryface—yes, the one who, if you were near a radio a decade ago, cared what you think. Joseph and Dun send off Clancy with a chaotic, maximalist record that no one else could make, mostly because no one else would consider it.
This is Twenty One Pilots in its purest form. Opener “City Walls” is a five-minute litmus test, with gigantic “oh-woah” hooks, soaring choruses, fuzzy bass tones, overdriven drums, and yes, rapping. It’s also pure fan service; the deeply ludicrous $1 million music video frequently calls back to past work and the song itself interpolates their single “Holding on to You.” It’s fascinating to hear a Christian-adjacent band reprise the words “entertain my faith” as the video depicts Clancy’s submission to a religious cult, but this isn’t the band to handle those implications.
Having once contributed to the Suicide Squad soundtrack, Pilots now convey the bubbly energy of James Gunn’s Superman reboot. You don’t need to know about the Bishops’ necromancing powers to enjoy the frenetic snowboarding-game breakbeat and maniacal vocal processing of “The Contract.” There are dumb-clever antics throughout: “Garbage” teases an uplifting “Something Just Like This” piano part before Joseph blurts out “I feel like garbage!” The song “Rawfear” speeds up on the line “never slowing down,” then abruptly returns to the original tempo—because he can’t escape the cycle. There’s hardly a breather until “Cottonwood,” a loving tribute to Joseph’s grandfather, and the meditative closer, “Intentions.” There’s also “Downstairs,” a dolled-up demo from their pre-major label days, but the vestigial self-seriousness feels out of place on an album like this.
The most engaging motif in the Pilots catalog remains Joseph’s complex relationship with his fans. On Vessel standout (give or take a reggae break) “Guns for Hands,” he felt responsible for their mental health as his own deteriorated. On Trench ballad “Neon Gravestones,” he cautioned them not to glorify his death should he one day lose his battle with depression. The tension comes to a head on Breach. Earlier this year, somebody briefly stole a kick drum from Dun’s kit at a concert, and throughout “Center Mass,” the band samples another fan’s cautionary “I really don’t think you should take that!” On “Drum Show,” seemingly in response to this fiasco, Joseph pays tribute to his burnt-out bandmate, who’s “stuck between a rock and a home, two places he does not wanna go.” When Joseph says, “This has not been interesting in a while” on “One Way,” a fundamentally earnest band fully admits to disillusionment.
Twenty One Pilots’ pure pop songs—like Scaled and Icy’s “Shy Away”—are often their best, which makes their ongoing attempts at hip-hop all the more frustrating. Joseph once gave Zane Lowe a playlist of his greatest influences, and not only was Ben Gibbard on it twice, the only rapper was Matisyahu. On Breach, they sound like they maybe gave GNX a passing listen (the call-and-response on “Center Mass” is very “Reincarnated”), but their engagement with the genre remains shallow. No one has ever sounded less convincing than Tyler “gangstas don’t cry, therefore I’m Mr. Misty Eyed” Joseph singing about “empty Uzis” on “Rawfear.” But when they get the balance right, they wind up with some of their best material to date: “Mass” starts with a suitably moody verse over a two-chord vamp and ends with a genuinely exciting double-time outro.
Right now it’s hard to imagine a cultural re-evaluation for Twenty One Pilots, the way people who grew up in the ’00s eventually gave My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park (both obvious influences) their flowers. But seeing the likes of MGK attempt a similar style without the same ambition puts the duo’s merit into perspective, and at least Pilots are thoroughly committed to their uncool niche. They’d be more respected if they did away with the rapping entirely, but that would fundamentally change what this band is and why it got this far. As for poor Clancy, he fails to break the cycle and, in a Matrix Reloaded-esque twist, the rebels must find another “Clancy” to continue the fight. It’s a surprisingly sobering ending: No one here truly transcends their limitations, but it’s only a matter of time before they try again.
