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If the Twenty One Pilots fan base once functioned as a sort of secular youth group for troubled kids, on Scaled And Icy, the grownup jumps out. ( I speak from experience.) This extends to the downright chipper attitude he brings to the new songs. They kept up this refinement process on 2018’s Trench, often leaning into the harder, hipper sides of their sound: heavy bass-powered rock on “Jumpsuit,” blown-out futuristic rap on “Levitate,” soulfully fizzy ’80s pop on “My Blood.” With Scaled And Icy, Joseph often swings back in the other direction, letting himself be unashamedly corny the way parents often do.
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But over time - as evidenced by “Stressed Out” and subsequent hits “Ride” and “Heathens,” which made Twenty One Pilots the first band since the Beatles to land two songs in the Hot 100’s top five - they’ve been figuring out how to boil down all those influences into something more streamlined. Another keyboard groove on “Mulberry Street” evokes Elton John’s “Benny And The Jets.” With “Never Take It” they have somehow crossbred “Sympathy For The Devil” with the New Radicals’ “Get What You Give.” The unique sonic DNA that made Twenty One Pilots one of the most popular and influential rock groups of the 2010s is still discernible: a kitchen-sink quality that yielded songs like early fan favorite “Ode To Sleep,” which Frankenstein’d together bits of Queen-via-My Chemical Romance arena rock, big-tent EDM, and nerdcore rap.
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The first song on Scaled And Icy - short for “scaled back and isolated,” a nod to the album’s genesis in Joseph’s basement studio during quarantine - is “Good Day,” a jaunty piano-rocker in the vein of Paul McCartney and ELO.
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So perhaps it’s not that surprising that his band’s new album sometimes goes full dad-rock. Most notably, last year, just before COVID shut the world down, Joseph and his wife Jenna welcomed a baby girl. We’ve all grown up a lot since the mid-2010s, Twenty One Pilots included. Half a decade later, they’ve started cribbing from the boomers too. It also made them an easy target for anyone seeking to rant about kids these days and their avocado toast or whatever - never mind that these millennial poster boys’ quirky hybrid sound owed as much to eclectic Gen-Xers like Beck, Sublime, and the Beastie Boys. Pining for the carefree innocence of youth was not invented by Twenty One Pilots’ generation, but the overtness with which they longed for those days in the face of factors like student loan debt - and the groundswell of popularity that took “Stressed Out” all the way to #2 a year after its release - made them natural avatars for millennial anxiety. Over a thumping reggae-tinged slow-creep, between sometimes pitched-down rap verses like “I was told when I get older all my fears would shrink/ But now I’m insecure and I care what people think,” Joseph sang of his desire to be sung to sleep by his mother, and of instead being greeted with the jarring demand, “Wake up, you need to make money!” In the video, he and Dun - the drummer and Silent Bob of this partnership - sipped Capri Suns, hung out at their parents’ homes, and cruised the streets of their native Columbus on oversized tricycles. Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun’s biggest hit, 2015’s “Stressed Out,” was all about wishing they could go back to childhood and live a happy-go-lucky existence unburdened by the pressures of adulthood. For proof, look no further than the massively successful pop-rock duo Twenty One Pilots. You can only cling to your big wheel for so long before adult life comes for you.