Last summer, pop radio began playing a fiendish earworm about two young men who feared the ordinary demands of adulthood. A year later, those men have become the biggest new band in America. You may not be familiar with Twenty One Pilots—they’re a slippery phenomenon, selling out arenas while remaining nearly invisible to those outside their active fan base—but you’d know the hook of “Stressed Out” if you heard it: the song has enjoyed non-stop airplay for almost a year. Tyler Joseph, the twenty-seven-year-old vocalist and songwriter for the band, composes in hooks; his melodies sound like bar darts swooping toward a bull’s-eye, and the “Stressed Out” chorus is as bright as its minor key will allow. “If we could turn back time,” Joseph sings, “to the good old da-ays, when our mama sang”—and here’s where your ears might prick up in recognition—“us to sleep, but now we’re stressed out.”
Joseph is a dexterous front man, a chameleon between songs as well as within them. On the verses of “Stressed Out,” he raps, with a taut, earnest bounce that recalls Macklemore or Gym Class Heroes. He rhymes “student loans,” which are bad, with “treehouse homes,” which are good; he bemoans the people who say, “Wake up, you need to make money.” Behind his wholesome flow, the instrumentation sweetens; an arpeggiated piano softens the snap of the drummer Josh Dun’s beat. The song is so idiosyncratic—a lyrical, emo, rap-rock song about a boy’s need for his mommy—that it’s got a whiff of the one-hit wonder. But it’s not that: Twenty One Pilots keep charting. As of last week, they became the first “alternative” band to land two singles in the Top Ten of the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously: “Heathens,” from the “Suicide Squad” soundtrack, and the emo-reggae track “Ride.” Meanwhile, “Stressed Out,” their calling card, still hovers in the thirties.
All three songs share the dirtbag camaraderie of Joseph’s delivery and a certain paranoiac groove. But they become harder to categorize the more you listen. Joseph and Dun are devoted Christians from Columbus, Ohio, and they combine a kind of stalwart Midwesternness with a genre fluidity that feels deployed to confound. The duo is signed to Fueled by Ramen, an imprint probably best known for putting out the work of Fall Out Boy, and they share an insistent puerility and melodic flamboyance with their pop-punk labelmates. But they also switch between E.D.M., dubstep, rap, reggae, nu-metal, ukulele folk, glam rock, and piano balladeering at card-trick speed. They sound like Jason Mraz and Panic! at the Disco, Coldplay and 311, Walk the Moon and Imagine Dragons and Porter Robinson. Name any white-male-fronted musical act from the past two decades that’s achieved significant commercial success while inspiring critical apathy, and you will hear that sound in Twenty One Pilots, if you listen long enough.
This amalgamated aesthetic is catnip to a significant portion of American listeners but functions like an invisibility cloak against music writers. Earlier this year, in the Times Magazine, Jayson Greene, an editor at Pitchfork, wrote about his realization that the band with the No. 3 song in America was a band he’d never heard of. “What else didn’t I know about?” he asked. “Where was I, in relation to everyone else?”
Last Thursday, I met up with everyone else to attend Twenty One Pilots’ second sold-out show in Madison Square Garden. It was the last stop of the first leg of their hundred-and-nineteen-night world tour. The arena was full, the crowd was restless, and the air was playoff-game electric. When the band took the stage, in bank-robber ski masks, the audience—which was all ages, with plenty of thirty-year-olds mixed in with the teen-agers—collectively, hysterically screamed. In the pit below me, a buff young man lifted another man on his shoulders. For two straight hours, as men in hazmat suits blasted the crowd with fog and Dun walked on the audience’s hands while encased in a red plastic ball and Joseph belted “My Heart Will Go On” as if it were by Queen rather than Céline Dion, these two buff men, along with most of the arena, sang every word.
The name Twenty One Pilots, if you’re wondering, comes from the Arthur Miller play “All My Sons,” in which a sixty-year-old man named Joe Keller knowingly ships defective airplane parts overseas during World War II, causing the death of—well, you get it. It’s a heavy inspiration. So is Blurryface, a character the band created and named its latest album after. Blurryface “represents a certain level of insecurity,” Joseph has said, and he sings in character as Blurryface for part of the live set, smearing his face and hands with black paint. The duo’s faces, along with those that appear in their onstage visuals, are frequently covered with bandannas or hockey masks or fetish hoods. At times—when a melody mushroomed into panic, or when Dun started going terrifically, precisely apocalyptic on the drums—I felt like I was listening to the soundtrack for a horror movie sponsored by Hot Topic, in which the great and terrible horror was just learning to be you.
It’s a strange aesthetic, another amalgamation—a PG-rated blend of “Mr. Robot” and “The Purge.” It also feels a little obvious, this implication that one’s face, one’s self, is too dangerous to be shown. A religious reading is easy to grasp: Joseph was homeschooled before attending a Christian school where his father was principal, and Dun wasn’t allowed to listen to hip-hop or rock. The refrain on their album opener sounds exactly like praise and worship: “Can you save my heavy, dirty soul?” But, watching them, you’re left with a simpler impression, and a broader one. What Twenty One Pilots do best, at the center of their suburban musical hodgepodge, is bring certain teen-bait ideas together: guilt with defiance, insecurity with confidence, paranoia with total command.
The arena was full of people who had been waiting for this, and there was, in the air, a sense of adulation and tearful communion that I associate with acts at the level of Beyoncé—a feeling that is particular to a handful of arena-filling musicians each year. I sat down briefly and my seat bounced to perfect eighth notes. Joseph merely had to glance at a section of the crowd and they’d shriek wildly; when he and Dun saluted their longtime tour manager with a plaque and a selfie, a girl in the section beside me did rap hands and cried. Toward the end, they played “Stressed Out,” singing the chorus a cappella with the crowd: nearly twenty thousand people with their phones raised like candles, wishing their moms could sing them to sleep.
The Slippery Appeal of the Biggest New Band in America – The New Yorker