Twenty One Pilots are back to being “not reassuring”
After 2018's “Trench”, a record in which their crazy and unpredictable pop had reached a peakTwenty One Pilots released in 2021 “Scaled and Icy”a project undoubtedly the result of the insecurities of the pandemic, but tasteless. Anyone who has seen the duo live at least once knows how much it can be electric, crazy, dangerous, with singer Tyler Joseph climbing everywhere and teasing the audiencebetween burning cars and devastated objects, but at the same time sweet, empathetic and full of deep songs. That of Twenty One Pilots, in some respects, it is a sonic universe made of extremes. In “Scaled and Icy” all this, at least on the sound front, disappeared: a flat disc in which the old dynamite and poignant imagery was flattened to leave room for a sort of optimism. The title of that album, in fact, is the anagram of “Clancy is dead”.
Yes, because that world reached the columns of “Trench”, with protagonist the fighter Clancysymbol of the duo's storytelling, was no longer there. But now that journey made of sounds and words that mix in a crazy and persuasive way, with “Overcompensate”, their new single, is back. “Where do I come from? I was born right here, right now. It originated right before your eyes. If you can't see, I'm Clancy,” Tyler Joseph sings. And with this track Clancy, their character, is also back. This new course, which effectively takes up the band's historical sound, was also anticipated by a clip that traces the history of the fighter imagined by the group. A short film with several previously unreleased scenes from the era “Blurryface/Trench”the two symbolic albums of the group, a video narrated by the voice of singer Tyler Joseph, through which it is announced that the concept of the album will pick up where it left off.
Joseph himself also mentions the latest album “Scaled and Icy,” which he describes as “an attempt to flatten the masses” (reference to the catchier sounds of the album compared to its predecessors) by Clancy. In “Overcompensate” layers of synths build over a beat where the rapped words slide and paint a fast world, in which everything seems indecipherable and elusive. With over 33 billion streams worldwide and more than 3 million tour tickets sold, the duo composed of Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun, originally from Columbus, have established themselves as one of the most successful bands of recent years. Co-produced by Joseph and Paul Meany, “Clancy”, their new album out on May 17thmarks the final chapter in an ambitious multi-disc narrative first introduced with 2015's multi-platinum “Blurryface.”