Joseph still lives there, and wrote and recorded the entirety of their upcoming album Scaled and Icy in his home. Twenty One Pilots is made up of Joseph and Josh Dun, who founded the band in their Columbus, Ohio, hometown. For the band’s young audience, their music was validation, catharsis and therapy all in one-it wasn’t uncommon for members of the fanbase (dubbed the Skeleton Clique) to earnestly assert that the band’s music saved their lives. In the same vein as Nirvana or Green Day during their respective heydays, the Twenty One Pilots oeuvre found its niche in making sad, isolated kids feel utterly understood. It was as if someone had reached into my pubescent brain, plucked out all the messy thoughts and disparate anxieties, and handed them back to me on a hand-me-down MP3 player with the promise that someone, somewhere, got it. Lead singer Tyler Joseph’s anxious, frenetic allegories on depression, illness and suicide felt nothing short of religious. So, like many people, 2015 was the year I found Twenty One Pilots-but for me, just like many things are when you’re 14, the discovery was earth-shattering. At the time, the hormone soup marinating my brain like a flank steak had me absolutely convinced that nobody in the history of human civilization could even come close to comprehending the depths of my misery. I was achingly, crushingly sad in a way that I didn’t even really have the tools to understand-words like “depression” and “anxiety” had yet to enter my lexicon. I’ve learned that much.Ģ015 also happened to be the year when I walked into high school for the first time, armed with nothing but a bevy of undiagnosed personality disorders and a My Chemical Romance t-shirt. Since then, TOP has become a bona-fide phenomenon, racking up billions of worldwide streams and securing themselves a place in the cultural zeitgeist as the new face of teen angst.īeing truly happy is way better than being able to hang onto some form of unhappiness just so you can make a career out of it. The track’s lamentations on anxiety and maturity catapulted it to the top of the alternative and mainstream charts, and brought the young band from Ohio with it. In 2015, you’d be hard-pressed to turn on the radio without hearing the thrumming reggae beats and cerebral rhymes of Twenty One Pilots’ breakout hit Stressed Out.

All twenty one pilots songs