Twenty One Pilots – ‘Clancy’ review: concept-heavy finale falls short

24 May, 2024

Twenty One Pilots

The final track on Twenty One Pilots‘ most-recent album, 2021’s ‘Scaled and Icy’, stood apart from the others, and in interviews, frontman Tyler Joseph suggested it offered a hint as to where the band were heading next. This sort of breadcrumb trail is catnip to the duo’s long-time followers; their diehard fans, who call themselves the Skeleton Clique, have won awards for their dedication to unspooling the tightly-wound narrative threads that Joseph and bandmate Josh Dun weave through their albums.

That song, ‘Redecorate’, will also have pleased fans caught off-guard by that record’s unusually sunny disposition, with the Pilots having taken a post-pandemic turn away from the claustrophobic feel and conceptual nature of their previous albums. ‘Redecorate’ was ruminative, atmospheric and, as we now know, would lead into this seventh album ‘Clancy’, which concludes a narrative arc that began on 2018’s ‘Trench’. We follow the titular character as he attempts to escape a fictional dystopia called Dema. He had been sidelined on ‘Scaled and Icy’, the title of which is an anagram of “Clancy is dead”.

It is head-spinning stuff, and begs a basic question, which is as to why Twenty One Pilots do not strive for the same sophistication in their sound as they do in their thematic world-building. Theirs is a radio-friendly, electronically-tinged blend of rock and rap that fills arenas and puts up huge streaming numbers, but that had not matured in any real way until ‘Trench’, when suddenly there was a renewed urgency that manifested itself in searing riffs and towering choruses.

‘Scaled and Icy’’s veer off into upbeat pop felt like a step backwards, one that the band are struggling to shake on Clancy. The nervy atmosphere promised by ‘Redecorate’ materialises on moody opener ‘Overcompensate’, one of the few real highlights here, but fails to sustain itself. Instead, the pair lapse into a sonic breeziness on the likes of ‘Backslide’ and ‘Vignette’ that works against the heaviness of the lyrics; self-doubt and self-excoriation are back on the menu after ‘Scaled and Icy’. The record fares better when it shoots for genuine experimentation, like on the weird, spacey ‘Lavish’; otherwise, ‘Clancy’ is more often than not the sound of a band spinning their wheels, caught in a strange space where their colourful conceptual ideas are being painted from a beige musical palette.