came oozing out of Columbus, Ohio, with their resolutely Midwestern, amicably dystopian 2015 hit “Stressed Out,” an emo-rap-industrial-pop slab of sing-songy melancholy that touched enough of a nerve to catapult theinto Adele/Beyoncé echelons of chart success. Twenty One Pilots’ post-genre sound was well-timed for the full blossoming of the streaming era. went from reggae-lite to ukulele twerpiness to pop-punk to piano-pop to EDM.
The music also suggests the summing-up of a long journey, the same willful eclecticism now piloted by more mature studio artistes . They zip from the Blink-y pump of “Next Semester,” in which a botched suicide attempt becomes a moment of self-discovery, to the anthemic emo-rap of “Backslide,” to the Killers-size neo-new Wave of “Midwest Indigo,” to the trippy buoyancy of “Lavish.” Yet the cumulative result never feels as jarring or scattered as such a jumble might suggest.
When Twenty One Pilots broke through with “Stressed Out,” they had their finger on the experience of young people trying to locate an authentic self in an era of micro-managed medications and mental wellness jargon. Here they often seem to be updating that dislocated feeling through a middle-aged lens. “I requested counsel with the counselor/And he canceled twice,” Joseph sings on “Midwest Indigo,” where dealing with winter is deployed as a metaphor for suffering through a frozen relationship.
The most on-the-nose of these songs is “Oldies Station,” which brings to mind Ben Folds doing Eighties synth-pop, as Joseph sings about having “nothing in the tank in a season of lessons learned in giving up.” The solution? “Push on through,” he sings, adding that if you do you might get to enjoy stuff like hearing a song you like while waiting at a red light and/or attending your daughter’s first dance recital.
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