2015: Against all odds, the nerdy class black sheep makes a friend. The attempt at trust doesn’t go unpunished. The friend journeys down the alt-right pipeline, betraying him. Meanwhile, as a hopeless romantic, the black sheep continuously embarrasses himself in delusionships everyone knows are a lost cause except him. He ends the chapter alone.
2020: Somehow, the dorky ugly duckling finds a new friend. His ‘partner-in-crime’ betrays him as well, alleging he gave him n-word passes——throwing the duckling under the bus (who was the only emergency contingency in sight). Meanwhile, still a hopeless romantic, the duckling inadvertently pushes away the one person with enough patience for him. He ends the chapter alone.
2025: the same pretentious suburban Sisyphus continues pushing his rock up the mountain, but this is definitely the furthest I – *sorry* – he has ever gotten, successfully failing upwards through life. While the story has gotten more complicated, it’s still the same equation, just with different variables.
My mom keeps asking me why I don’t like visiting home. My leading theory: my addiction to overstimulation leaves the silence of the Akron suburbs too boring to return to without good reason. At home, not only does it feel like I’m away from the story’s A-plot, but it’s also a reminder that I can’t run away from my problems, because the source always catches up with me: myself.
I don’t want my family to think it’s their fault that my hometown isn’t a happy place. For the sake of clarity: it’s not that home is an unhappy place. It just isn’t a happy place either.
Like this drawn-out intro to an emo pop album review, Twenty One Pilots’ 2025 album is a breach of trust. The newest offering from ‘local’ band Twenty One Pilots was heralded as the ultimate Breach in the cycle that their 10-year dystopian fantasy saga has been structured around. However, when you take the bait, you find it’s a full circle moment sonically and narratively, the protagonist Clancy catches up with himself.
Bandmates Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun don’t waste time making this point. When watching the bittersweet epilogue music video for album opener/saga finale “City Walls”, you can either view it as Diogenes tragically plummeting all the way back to Ground Zero or an ode to the faith at the basis of incremental change.
Throughout the band’s career, they’ve always beat around the bush—and the bush being that they are a Christian Rock band. When zealots say they feel the presence of God during the live music at mass, they mean they just like the way the bass is hitting or the way the drums are getting bruised. The way people talk about megachurches, ministries, and One Direction concerts sound the same. Twenty One Pilots plays with both sides of the coin of awe. They don’t necessarily hide it, but the reluctance to namedrop Christ and their tendency to swap lead guitars with throbbing basses, somber pianos, and kitschy ukuleles obscures their roots. (Tyler Joseph is to non-Hawaiian ukulele players what Nick Cheo is to bedroom DJs). Twenty One Pilots is definitively rock but not quite guitar music. Twenty One Pilots have always danced in this ambiguity. With Breach, they are finally openly LIFETEEN-coded—most evident on tracks like “Garbage” and “City Walls”.
While it’s hard to imagine now, I didn’t like music that much growing up. My mom tried to get me to play piano, and I threw a tantrum so bad she never suggested it ever again. I didn’t come around to the whole “music” thing until hearing a certain 2015 millennial angst anthem during a field trip to the bowling alley in 5th grade. Every single person in my class knew the words except me, and for some reason, the room’s acoustics were perfectly engineered to resonate with me specifically and take my musical virginity.
Twenty One Pilots is more than just ‘Gay Imagine Dragons’. In a way similar to Gorillaz—or perhaps even Taylor Swift—their discography can either be a gateway drug to a deeper relationship with music or an opiate for weak-willed/easily impressed consumerists ready to throw wads of cash at their chosen brand. After their saccharine post-COVID drop Scaled & Icy (I still cannot believe they made a bad album and tried to use lore to justify it) and the underwhelming Clancy propped by highly impressive singles, I was afraid I’d misplaced my faith in them. Breach’s tracklist is not as subversive of its obvious influences as their immersive Trench but delivers hard enough to be a ‘whelming’ farewell record and thank you for sticking around all this time—a breakeven on my investment.
With “City Walls”, they drop the genre-blending and graduate to unashamed rock music characterized by blown-out walls of sound and 2010’s ‘oh-yeah’s—the diploma wrapped in a bow by a lustral quote of their debut single as a duo. It’s not a ‘breach’ in any cycle, it’s a return to form and mature take on the style of Joseph’s eponymous 2009 record, and one of their best tracks.
“RAWFEAR” sounds like the musical equivalent to a wide-eyed homeschooled kid who against all odds integrated into society and became a well-functioning adult. The anthemic track “Downstairs” rings like a shelved 2010s tune that aged surprisingly well. Pop single “Drum Show” is a small full circle moment on its own, as their sound engineer worked with Turnstile only for this track to come out like a carbonated, sugary Brendan Yates mocktail. “Cottonwood” and “Intentions” frame the album, giving it very needed breathing space. All these songs prove basic but comforting and nostalgic.
The elephant in the room when it comes to TOP has always been Joseph’s rapping. In fifth grade, I had to do insane mental gymnastics to poke fun at Taylor Swift’s shallow out-of-touch lyrics and then press play on “Fairly Local”’s fake 808s and “Lane Boy”’s infamous ‘I wasn’t raised in the hood’ bar. While he’s grown dramatically writing-wise, bouts on their previous album still felt very KidzBop. But on Breach, the rapping finally comes off closer to Linkin Park standing with JAY-Z than Ed Sheeran collabing Future. “The Contract” breaches the trend by sounding more like Linkin Park than Linkin Park has in over a decade. Likewise, “Center Mass” is a career highlight, mixing their rap experience with their coming out of the ‘guitar music’ closet to catalyze an ever-evolving combustive reaction. The tracks embody them wearing their influences on their sleeve. Echoes of the Killers, Owl City (see “Robot Voices”), the Postal Service, and other indie staples bounce around on every track.
Despite their hefty contribution to the landfill of gratuitous vinyl variants, at the heart of this album lies the countercultural confession of love for the process. It exists in direct opposition to the algorithm-addled need to 2x-speed and ChatGPT your way through healing. In your darkest hour, when there’s no end in sight and all you can see is the overwhelming world of endless ‘reaping what you sow’ and your past—overflowing into the present with all your mistakes—looms large, all that matters is recognizing the progress you’ve made and that you keep trying. The inconvenient truth is nobody will love you the way you want to be loved and you will let people down. You can’t fast forward to a new you. The final note is you just have to “try to be”.
Genre: Alternative Rock, Pop Rock, and Alternative Hip-Hop // Post-Tumblr Ohio-core Alt Pop
Length: 13 tracks – 47 minutes
Rating: 7.8/10
Current Favorites *changes daily*: City Walls, Center Mass, Downstairs, Drum Show, Cottonwood, Intentions
Lowlights: None *was Days Lie Dormant and Garbage but they both clicked while writing this*
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