Good news, Clique: all will be revealed. In an interview with NME, Twenty One Pilots singer Tyler Joseph promised fans that the epic saga that began with the group’s breakthrough 2015 Blurryface album and continued through to last year’s Trench, with the expansion of the drama surrounding Dema and the Banditos, will all be wrapped up at some point.
“There’s definitely an end-game,” Joseph said. “There’s a story. I think I was very specific that there’s a reason why the record ends with [the song] ‘Leave The City’ and the song itself is a kind of cliff-hanger. I mean, the whole thing was it’s setting up for what’s next and it’d be silly to not at least resolve what we’ve already started.” Joseph also said the band plans to expand the story on their next album, which promises the introduction of another new dramatis personae.
“There’s a character that hasn’t been talked about on any record yet that plays a huge role in the narrative that obviously will need to be talked about and it’s probably where we’re going next,” he said. “So it’s not going to be rehashing all the same themes, but it’s gonna recall all that and introduce a new character, a new direction.”
Joseph, 30, revealed that he and drummer Josh Dun have already started writing the next album and that even though they are on a global tour he sometimes wakes up at night with a melody he just can’t shake. “It’s hard ‘cause we’re doing this on tour, but I actually woke up two nights ago. This doesn’t usually happen, it sounds super-dramatic, but I woke up with a melody in my head and grabbed my phone and recorded it,” Joseph said. “Then went back to bed and when I woke up fully, I remembered that I did that and I opened the voice memo to listen to it.”
Don’t get too excited, though. It’s early days and even Joseph was psyched about the new tune, there’s a way to go on it. “In my head, I was just gifted with this thing that happened in a dream and I’m so excited about it and I listen to it and was like, ‘OK, it’s not that great…but oh, OK, hold on, if I were to use that chord to start out and then OK, if that chord goes here’, so it’s really fun to be on tour and trying to be influenced to write ‘cause a lot of crazy things can happen and you never sleep well on tour,” he said. “I mean, our version of getting drunk or high is just being tired.”
Dun pulled the curtain back a bit more in the interview, adding that while “everything’s strategic” with the group’s meticulously built world, not every track on Blurryface or Trench is necessarily part of ” what you would envision as this crazy narrative that you would imagine on a Netflix show or movie… there will always probably be elements of us that peek out as well, adn maybe that would even be a whole record in between the ones explaining the narrative — maybe, maybe not.”
The duo are currently on tour in the UK and will hit Europe and South America before heading back to North America on May 12 for a show at Rogers Arena in Vancouver.
