Twenty One Pilots are again with a brand new music, “The Contract,” which serves because the lead single for his or her new idea album Breach. The document is about to be the climactic finale of the five-album narrative that started with 2015’s Blurryface (the one with mega hits “Burdened Out” and “Experience”). After final yr’s Clancy — which leaned even more durable into the lore-driven, narrative epic-style they’re going for — “The Contract” is meant to be one thing of a ‘first episode’ for the concluding saga, choosing up on the cliffhanger second they left off at of their prior album.
It’s terrible.
For those who’re studying this and also you’ve all the time shared a disdain for the Ohio duo’s hybrid pop-rock-rap experiments, this doesn’t come as a shock. However should you’re studying this and are one of many 1000’s of Twenty One Pilots superfans, you would possibly suppose calling “The Contract” a complete catastrophe is a bit unfair, given the scope of this long-running narrative they’ve been developing and the way a lot effort they’ve put into to world-building, easter eggs, and different good workout routines in fan engagement.
That’s positively true; I’m very impressed by how a lot Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun have dedicated to the bit. Artists have lengthy tried idea albums and several other have used a number of consecutive data to trace an over-arching narrative. Nobody has actually carried out it for a complete decade throughout 5 albums, and whenever you take a look at the unbelievable numbers this band has carried out when it comes to streams, ticket gross sales, and rising their viewers, Twenty One Pilots are justifiably in their very own lane and have achieved this by embracing transmedia storytelling.
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I say all that simply to reiterate that this new music is a whole mess, a sloppy hodge-podge of genres and kinds that immediately compete with each other from second to second. It’s fantastic to do idea songs — welcome, even — however their insistence on tying in these in depth, high-stakes kernels of lore doesn’t assist the ultimate product. The story is just impactful if the music is nice by itself, and that isn’t the case right here. Leaping into “The Contract” with none of the thematic context is like watching Avengers: Endgame as your first Marvel film: It’s in all probability nice for these within the know, but it surely’s largely simply incoherent noise and meaningless motion.
Divorced from no matter narrative is happening (which, judging by the music video, is a few loopy sci-fi fantasy nonsense higher left in a teen’s sketchbook), “The Contract” is a problem sonically. There’s a nu-metal twist, autotuned muttering, a corny rap verse, and melodies that really feel extra involved with jamming in phrases than touchdown with weight; the best way Joseph wraps the phrase “necromancer” across the melody’s triplet rhythm is grating, however shockingly, the falsetto-laden “Ooooh, guarantees and contracts” is even worse.
Dun’s fast, busy drumming, the chintzy, dramatic synths clashing with distorted electrical guitars, the terrible half-time (trap-inspired?) break, the stress between nostalgia ploys (the monitor completely remembers Meteora-period Linkin Park) and modern manufacturing, Joseph’s unimaginative, generic strains about nervousness, insomnia, and paranoia… all of those parts clashing collectively makes for a typically dangerous listening expertise and units Breach as much as be an overdramatic mess.
Twenty One Pilots do have some good tunes right here and there, however “The Contract” is a worst-case-scenario Twenty One Pilots music. You wouldn’t guess that, given the best way the music and music video are at the moment being obtained by their followers. Throughout the YouTube feedback part, dozens of sleuths try to make sense of the easter eggs and narrative, whereas others are reacting to the overstuffed music as if it’s a deliberate reference to every of their earlier albums. “This isn’t only a music — it’s a breakdown, a reminiscence, a warning ,” one fan’s remark reads. “The Contract,” definitely, is for them; the remainder of us are left with a collage of scraps and half-hearted concepts.
Twenty One Pilots epitomize the streaming period, the place a mix-and-match stylistic technique and a prioritization of idea, aesthetics, and narrative come over the standard of the music itself. To some followers on the lookout for a extra immersive expertise with an artist that isn’t, say, Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, Twenty One Pilots have tapped into that power higher than any rock-adjacent act of their nook. Immersion is cool, meta-textual references and lore-heavy choices are too. However idea or not, if the music behind it’s this dangerous, no matter world-building that comes alongside is meaningless.