After the long, enduring wait for Twenty One Pilots’ latest album Trench, Twenty One Pilots fans can rest assured knowing that the alternative duo’s next album is currently in the works.
That’s right, skeleton clique. The creative duo of singer Tyler Joseph and drummer Josh Dun are already working on their next album. The band’s singer and songwriter, Tyler Joseph, confirmed in an interview with NME, that he has already started writing songs for the band’s follow-up album to the cryptic and mythological Trench. And it looks like the album will begin to answer and resolve the many theories and lingering questions Trench left behind…
“There’s definitely an end-game. There’s a story.” Joseph says. “I think I was very specific that there’s a reason why the record ends with [the song] ‘Leave The City’ and the song itself is a kind of cliffhanger. I mean, the whole thing was it’s setting up for what’s next and it’d be silly to not at least resolve what we’ve already started.”
What’s even better? It looks like there will be a new character introduced to the band’s newest album that is definitely a part of the continuing story of Trench. I just happen to have a few theories about who it may be…
“There’s a character that hasn’t been talked about on any record yet that plays a huge role in the narrative that obviously will need to be talked about and it’s probably where we’re going next.”
He continues his thought, “So it’s not going to be rehashing all the same themes, but it’s gonna recall all that and introduce a new character, a new direction.”
Could this character possibly be the mysterious Clancy?? The faceless escapee from the city of Dema who writes deeply emotional, cryptic, and thought-provoking letters and leaves them for fans to decode on the Dema website??
Any hardcore Twenty One Pilots fan will tell you they have spent their fair share of late-nights during the band’s year-long hiatus staring at their computer screen, theorizing and decoding the perplexing messages left on the Dema website. All seemingly written by one character whose identity remains unknown: Clancy.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Take a look at dmaorg – a cryptic website that revealed itself through hidden codes and links in videos on the band’s website during their year-long silence – then we’ll talk.
My theory still resides with the idea that we will be hearing Clancy’s side of the story in the duo’s next album.
Along with developing his vision and expanding the story for the new album, Joseph has already begun writing new songs.
“Oh yeah. It’s hard ‘cause we’re doing this on tour, but I actually woke up two nights ago. This doesn’t usually happen, it sounds super-dramatic, but I woke up with a melody in my head and grabbed my phone and recorded it. Then went back to bed and when I woke up fully, I remembered that I did that and I opened the voice memo to listen to it,” says the singer.
“In my head, I was just gifted with this thing that happened in a dream and I’m so excited about it and I listen to it and was like, ‘OK, it’s not that great…But oh, OK, hold on, if I were to use that chord to start out and then OK, if that chord goes here’, so it’s really fun to be on tour and trying to be influenced to write ‘cause a lot of crazy things can happen and you never sleep well on tour.”
“I mean, our version of getting drunk or high is just being tired,” he jokes. Ah, Tyler. Your classic one-liners.
It seems the band will continue to expand on the narrative that the duo introduced in their breakthrough album Blurryface. One that Joseph had prepared “for years” and through ‘Blurryface’ – a character that represents the singer’s insecurities and anxieties, shown through Joseph’s black-coated hands and neck – fans received a peek into the world Tyler created in his expansive and intense imagination. An imaginative narrative he created to combat and deal with the other sides of the mind that aren’t as fantastical, as he alludes while he describes Trench.
“It’s about using the art of storytelling to better understand a much less fantastical issue which is navigating your own psyche and giving it a destination and places you should and shouldn’t go and characters you should avoid. And that can be found inside each person’s struggle,” he explains.
“It’s interesting that ‘Blurryface’ – where I created a character that represents everything I didn’t like about myself and everything I’m trying to overcome coincidentally happened to be the record that really broke through for us,” he says. “That we’re forced to revisit it every night is a valuable lesson in your own personal insecurities: you work through it, you try to overcome it, but it’s never something you can just fully cast aside and separate yourself from.”
Whether the band’s next album will continue on with the story of Trench or start an entirely new narrative, one thing can be for sure, if it comes from the minds and imagination of Twenty One Pilots, it will have something important to say.
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