Trench
Having vaulted to new heights with 2015’s *Blurryface*, followed by nearly two solid years of touring, twenty one pilots were in need of a break. Recorded primarily in the band’s Columbus, Ohio, studio during a yearlong public silence, their fifth album *Trench* picks up where the band left off in both sound and subject, exploring rugged emotional terrain in a style by turns cathartic and cryptic. If *Blurryface* was, as Tyler Joseph told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe, a “mirror” for his insecurities, *Trench* is a place where he could go to regain control—or, as he puts it on the tender, album-closing “Leave the City”: “But this year/though I’m far from home/In trench I’m not alone.” What continues to resonate is Joseph’s ability to turn his personal pain into shared experience, his inner dialogue into public art. “Surrounded and up against a wall,” he sings on the disco-ish “My Blood,” “I’ll shred ’em all and go with you.” Whoever he might be talking to (his fans, his wife, his friends), you get the sense the words double as a promise to himself. “I never would have turned to music if I didn’t feel like I need to change or cope with something,” he told Beats 1. “I was perfectly fine before music, and then something happened where I just felt a buildup of some sort. I didn’t know how to decompress that and to have an outlet for it—I was forced to learn how to play the piano.”
A concept album about a fictional destination, the duo’s fifth album is a rich but accessible record that plays fast and loose with genre
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On their 2015 breakthrough, Blurryface, Twenty One Pilots were the ultimate post-Spotify rock band, flickering wildly through ideas and genre: Tyler Joseph’s vein-spilling emo rap, Josh Dun’s funky-hard Travis Barker drums, tweaks of electronic music and reggae, twee ukulele indie, the grandeur of a Broadway musical and existential lyrics with a metatextual flair.
Advancing the narrative started on their 2015 breakthrough, Blurryface, Ohio duo Twenty One Pilots continue the struggle with personal demons, diving deep into the darkness of the Trench and battling fresh enemies wrought from their newfound fame and fortune.
Twenty One Pilots - Trench review: twenty one pilots levitate to a higher level of musical maturity