Album Review: Breach by Twenty one Pilots
Photo by Fabien Kruszelnicki
For Twenty One Pilots, life has been imitating art. This September, they released their seventh album, Breach, a follow-up to last year’s Clancy and the conclusion to the accompanying story they’ve been telling since their breakout album Blurryface in 2015. For a decade, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun have built a story centered around cycles, conceptualizing mental health struggles into a dystopian world that has been fleshed out more with fan theories than a clear narrative from the band itself. The cycle repeats in both fiction and real life: Breach is the band’s first #1 album since Blurryface.
While Blurryface dominated the mid-2010s with its broad appeal, Breach launched to the top of the charts thanks to the band’s dedicated fanbase. Joseph knows this. After Blurryface’s success, he wanted the same for the following albums. That never happened, so he decided to focus instead only on writing an album the fans would appreciate, he explained in a tweet. While Breach may not have as much appeal to new listeners as even last year’s Clancy, it has clearly resonated with its target audience.
From beginning to end, Breach is riddled with references and callbacks to the band’s previous songs. Twenty One Pilots' albums always open with songs that encapsulate their entire musical style. “City Walls” boasts the band’s signature blend of rap verses and a memorable pop-rock chorus, as well as a 14-minute, million-dollar music video that concludes the “lore” through dramatic cinematography. Lyrically, the song’s bridge pulls from one of the band’s early songs, “Holding On To You,” and it melodically ends with the opening sirens of “Heavydirtysoul,” signalling the restart of the narrative cycle.
The grungy “Drum Show” is a tribute to Dun, and to the great delight of fans, includes his first official vocal contribution to a Twenty One Pilots song. “The Contract,” the album’s first single, is an intense, auto-tune-heavy track that also seems to include plenty of lore for fans to dissect.
Religious doubt and turmoil seem to underpin several of the songs on the album, most clearly in “Downstairs.” The song was apparently 14 years in the making: the conclusion of a demo known as “Korea.” The dramatic synth and emotionally-charged lyrics definitely fit the band’s work from around that time, but are also at home with their current sound. The catchy “Days Lie Dormant” and “Tally,” as well as the somber “Drag Path” (only available digitally for a limited time), continue the chronicle of Joseph’s mental-spiritual struggles.
Collaboration is another feature of Breach. “Robot Voices” is a change-up of the song “My Soft Spots My Robots” by the band Blanket Approval. In the opening of “Center Mass,” the duo follows through on their pithy promise at the end of their live shows, that “We are twenty one pilots and so are you,” by humorously sampling the audio from a fan’s video documenting an incident they faced last tour with a stolen drum.
“Cottonwood” continues a theme of eulogy from every album since Trench in 2018. The album concludes with “Intentions,” an appropriately quiet track that offers hope for when one does feel trapped in a cycle of relapse. And, of course, it is also a reference–this time to “Truce,” the final song of Vessel, whose melody it reverses.
For fans of Twenty One Pilots, Breach is a worthy conclusion, with plenty of lyrical and melodic Easter eggs to uncover. For new listeners, the album is still a solid entry and does not require a decade-long obsession and knowledge of a complicated storyline to appreciate its raw and sincere emotion.
