Twenty One Pilots’ Josh Dun and Tyler Joseph joined host Brad Steiner for a special Audacy Check In at the Hard Rock Hotel New York to celebrate the release of their 2024 album, Clancy, upcoming tour dates, and more.
The duo’s new offering, Clancy, is named after the protagonist introduced on 2018's Trench, and marks the final chapter in Twenty One Pilots' intricate story told across multiple albums, beginning with the band's 2015 breakthrough, Blurryface. Throughout the four album series -- which also includes 2021’s Scaled and Icy -- everything from art details to music videos had been specifically chosen for a reason.
“The story, I guess it was a bit of a hybrid in the overall arc of it was written out from the beginning, but there were a lot of twists and turns inside of the journey that we made,” Tyler says. “I guess in a way, we were really inspired by our own fans. As the story was being told, there were certain details that came out of the story because of watching how people reacted to it and what they were drawn to.”
“We knew what we were gonna say and what we wanted to accomplish with the story,” he adds. “Basically, the album ‘Blurryface’ is a reference to a character in the story that we've been telling, who's kind of the antagonist. We find out his real name is Nico and he's constantly -- basically, the lead character of ‘Clancy’ is constantly hunted down by this character. A lot of details go into where they're from and how they got there, and I'm really excited to tell how it all ends -- and that's what this, this album is gonna do.”
The idea to build a world around their music, Tyler says, arose when he realized that inside of his and Josh’s common goal of making music together, there were “so many artistic opportunities, whether it's the colors you use to tell the story, the font that you use, the band name, the album title, the album cover…. So, where it just starts out as ‘I just wanna make music and maybe perform some of it in front of some people,’ you quickly realize, ‘Oh wait, there's a ton more opportunity to be creative other than just making the music.'”
“We have some awesome people on our team too,” Tyler adds. “They've been helping us on the creative side for a long time. Shout outs to our crew of creatives that help us. ‘We'll be like, OK, hold on, what is the weather supposed to be like in this world in the city of Dema?’ I’ll remember we established that, you know, it's cloudy here and there's a sound that happens at night -- there's a lot of details of the world that you create, and sometimes you need to be reminded of, ‘What was this character's motivation, and what were we trying to do again?’ To have a few people to help you kind of collect and archive all of the story that you've been telling has been really important.”
“Like Tyler said earlier,” Josh adds, being inspired by fans has been a major driving force, “because when we started, we were playing in clubs so we didn't know. We had kind of like visions and dreams of what this would turn into, but we didn't know how deep we could get into it. Even starting the story, it's kind of just like, ‘OK, well, I hope people care enough to look into the story.’ As time's gone on and we've seen people do like find things and understand things, then that gives us more freedom really to be able to expand on that and have different areas in which we can share those visuals.”
As far as intricate fan theories go, Tyler admits, “Sometimes we'll text each other, we'll see something where someone's theorizing… they spend a lot of time coming up with that theory, you want it to be right for them. So I would say, ‘Should we tell them that's not right?’ There have been times where we've wanted to jump in and be like, ‘It's close, but not right.’”
“I can't think of anything particularly ...
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