It is wild to think that ten years ago was 2015, a whole decade since the musical Hamilton was released, since Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood flooded our ears a million times, and when Twenty-One Pilots’ biggest album, BlurryFace, was released.
The album with 14 songs broke records when every song was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in the digital era. Songs off the album like “Stressed Out” and “Ride” have become recognized worldwide, with Stressed Out gathering over 2.6 billion streams on Spotify and over 3 billion views on YouTube. Ride slowly follows this with 1.9 billion streams on Spotify and 1.5 billion views on YouTube. This incredible team of Tyler Joseph, Mike Elizondo, Tim Anderson, Mike Crossey, and Ricky Reed produced this album. Tyler Joseph, the singer of Twenty-One Pilots, was also the one to write all the music on the Blurryface record, showing the dedication he has toward this band and album.
The band consists of only two members, Tyler Joseph, the band’s singer and writer, and Josh Dun, the drummer. Over the years, Tyler Joseph has learned numerous other instruments to flesh out the sound of the band, some of the instruments being bass, guitar, and countless others. These two musicians have been friends and bandmates since 2009, and 6 years later, they would see their album be appreciated by the masses.
Blurryface officially turned 10 on May 17th of this year. To celebrate their anniversary, the band did some cryptic storytelling on their social media, a theme that the band continues to work on. Twenty-One Pilots tries to tell a story with their music, which started with their Blurryface record and has continued with their last three albums released in the following years. The goal of their last few albums has been to tell a story covering topics of mental health, self-doubt, and belonging. Through their music, they have been able to help many of their listeners and convey an interactive tale that they continue to build outside of their albums through their social media platforms.
From Blurryface to Trench, followed by Scaled and Icy, and then last year’s album release of Clancy, the story they have been building over the previous ten years is rumored to be coming to a head. With the stories finally rumoured to come in the following months, the band confirmed that after their story is over, they will continue producing singles and albums like they did before Blurryface. “Josh and I’ll… I think we’ll keep playing music, it’s just the story that we’ve been telling inside of the music that is better off having a bit of a final bow,” Tyler Joseph confirmed in an interview shortly after the release of his last album of Clancy.
The dedication of Twenty-One Pilots to create something different and interactive and to have a great message has been incredible to witness. Even after their story finishes, I hope to see Twenty-One Pilots go on to create other music-driven stories.
