As of Oct. 5, Twenty One Pilots’ fourth studio album, “Trench,” turned seven years old. “Trench” is not the most popular album from the band; however, it is the most critically acclaimed album by Twenty One Pilots.
The album before “Trench,” the album that put the band on the map, “Blurryface,” arrived in the music industry in May 2015, and was a massive hit. Songs like “Stressed Out” and “Ride” racked up hundreds of millions of streams on online music platforms. The album went gold in about six months and went Platinum in a little over a year. For an album to go gold, the album has to have 500,000 “units” sold. To go platinum, one million units are required.
“Trench” dove into new genres for the band, which include rock, rap-rock, and alternative rock. “Trench” had several accolades: a “Best Rock Song” Grammy nomination for the lead single and lead track on the album, “Jumpsuit,” and several other nominations from the Billboard Music Awards. The album also went platinum in May 2020.
The lead track on “Blurryface,” “Heavydirtysoul,” kicked off Twenty One Pilots’ “Dema” narrative within their music. The “Dema” narrative is a massive story, a metaphor for mental health that spans across ten years and five different albums. The final part of the story ends with the music video for “City Walls” on the newest album “Breach.”
With the release of their seventh studio album, “Clancy”, in 2024, which incorporated similar genres to “Trench”, the “Clancy World Tour” was announced. For the first half of the tour, the band toured the United States from Aug. to Dec. In the second half, the band toured stadiums in South America and Europe.
Throughout the tour, the band dropped subtle hints that related to their lore. Most of the hints were handwritten letters with random capitalization throughout. With the final tour date on May 17, Twenty One Pilots fans gathered all the capital letters, unscrambled them, and came up with “CONTRACT.” Much speculation about a double album theory went around the community, and most fans expected a huge announcement after the end of the “Clancy World Tour.”
After a brief tribute to “Blurryface,” which turned ten in May, Twenty One Pilots announced the release of their new album, “Breach”, and the lead single, “The Contract”. “The Contract” was set to be released on June 12 and would follow the events of “Paladin Strait,” the final track on “Clancy.” The official release date of Sept. 18 was announced later, after the release of the lead single.
Along with the announcement of “Breach” and “The Contract”, Twenty One Pilots also announced “The Clancy Tour: Breach,” which would be an extension of the “Clancy World Tour,” and would include the songs from “Breach”.
About a month after the release of the second single, “Drum Show,” “Breach” was released to the public. According to the Billboard Top 100 albums, Twenty One Pilots had an album debut at No. 1 For the first time since “Blurryface” in 2015. In the first week of its release, “Breach” had become the biggest debut for a Twenty One Pilots album, even bigger than “Trench”, which was highly anticipated after the pop hit of “Blurryface”.
