album review: 'scaled and icy' by twenty one pilots

At some point in the past few years, my relationship to the music of twenty one pilots shifted, and I’m not sure what happened.

And the weird thing is that I’m not sure I can pinpoint when it changed, or what really changed, but I know something did. Going back to their albums, I still think Vessel is pretty great, and Blurryface is one of my favourite albums of the 2010s and to my astonishment still holds up, and even if I’m cooler on Trench than a lot of people, it still produced some great individual cuts and I think ‘The Hype’ was quietly one of the best songs of 2018! But somewhere in the past year, I realized that my investment in new music from twenty one pilots was ebbing away, and I wasn’t sure what sparked it. Maybe it was being underwhelmed when I saw the duo live at a festival in 2019 - granted, in that same festival I had Joji, PUP, and even The !975 blow past all my expectations - maybe it was Tyler Joseph’s dumbass antics on social media in 2020, or maybe it was just so many acts appropriating what twenty one pilots did and even if they didn’t do it well, the sound began losing some lustre - glaring straight at AJR and grandson here, although you can trace a lot of twenty one pilots’ DNA to many of the Fueled By Ramen signings in the past five years, the majority of which have underperformed or imploded, and that’s not counting everyone trying to rip them off!

Or maybe it was the guitar. That was always something somewhat unique about twenty one pilots, for their weird genre mashup and all of their pomp and circumstance they never seemed like traditional rock stars, which forced them to get creative to build their ambitious bombast, but when ‘Level Of Concern’ became a one-off quarantine moment and we learned that Joseph was learning guitar, a part of my enthusiasm slipped because even despite being twenty one pilots, some of that unique restraint was slipping away. And when ‘Shy Away’ just sounded like an off-brand Strokes song and the new album was clocking under forty minutes, I started to get the uncanny feeling that this wouldn’t wind up as interesting or thought-provoking as they’d been in the past. And when you pair it with the fact that their “lore” has felt perennially undercooked no matter what the Clique would say, especially given just how self-referential their material has felt, I just couldn’t escape the gut feeling that Scaled And Icy would disappoint me. Maybe I would be wrong - hell, I’d be thrilled to be wrong - but even the slightly muted social media hype I had seen had me a bit worried about this…. so how is it?

…you know, I made a point early on when I covered Trench that I was shocked that Fueled By Ramen let them ship that record in the state it was in, a defiantly uncommercial move that was way more murky and abstract and didn’t produce anything close to the pop crossover single hits Blurryface did - yeah, it did well on the rock charts but that label hasn’t been trying to make rock music for a while now. And as such, there’s a part of me that listens to Scaled And Icy and hears a compromised project, which is why the album feels brighter and about the most accessible this band has ever been… but is that to their detriment when you can then make stark comparisons to the acts that have been ripping them off with far less critical acclaim, but more commercial success? It’s one reason why this album has been getting a lukewarm reception at best, even from some of the diehard fans… and this places me in a very awkward position. Because I don’t think this album is bad at all, and while part of that comes from overexposure to everyone who has tried to rip off twenty one pilots, another part of it comes from the distance I’ve had from the minutiae of their lore, or an understanding that so much of it is highly metaphorical and self-referential and especially coming off the arc of Trench, this is a band in prime danger of eating its own tail… but the problem is that they already kind of went down this path with Blurryface, so Scaled And Icy starts feeling like wandering through an increasingly hollow web of mirrors. Again, not at all a bad one, because if you’ve been following the thematic continuity of this band there’s a real emotional core to this for which I don’t think is getting nearly enough credit… but if you only hopped on board with Trench and considered everything they did before a jumbled, pretentious mess, this album will lose you, and I get why.

But I’m going to start with the sound on this album and where I’ll probably have more praise than many might expect - again, my biggest point of contention with twenty one pilots is that they have a great pop instinct that they could probably afforded to drill into more effectively, which is the big reason I’ve always considered Blurryface their strongest work, especially in terms of overall polish, and conversely where I liked moments on Trench, that was an album that prioritized atmosphere over their best hooks. Scaled And Icy is going back in the Blurryface direction but instead of picking up the cod reggae tones the band used to have, their melodic sensibilities are settling closer to a retro rock ‘n' roll sound, closer to cuts like ‘Not Today’ or even ‘Tear In My Heart’. And that’s a bit of a dicey move, because that’s been the foundation point of AJR’s last three albums and when you have a band with that much shrieking presence in the scene to say nothing of their recent chart success, it makes the comparison obvious and I’ve seen it in a lot of reviews thus far of this album. Now I would argue this actually winds up a boon for twenty one pilots - I don’t hate those retro melodies, I still hold ‘Not Today’ as one of my favourite twenty one pilots songs so I know they can do this well, for a band as consistently midwestern as twenty one pilots it’s a point of inspiration that feels a little more grounded in the artifice of small town Americana so it feels a little less plastic coming from them, and most importantly, twenty one pilots knows what a bassline is so there’s groove here! But twenty one pilots also pulls from a broader pool of retro beyond what the jauntiness of ‘Good Day’ and ‘Bounce Man’: I already mentioned ‘Shy Away’ between an early Strokes songs in everything but name, but that rollicking hazy revival that feels so turn of the millennium - and was already pioneered on ‘The Hype’ last album - is back even stronger on cuts ‘Saturday’ and especially ‘Never Take It’ which gives me the vibes of a Robbie Williams or New Radicals song in so many ways - we’ll come back to this, but even ‘Choker’ has some of that with its dance rock breakbeat. Or take the ‘Bennie & The Jets’ melodic parallels on ‘Mulberry Street’ that feels ever so askew in trying to imitate New York glamour, or how ‘Formidable’ feels like a chintzy infomercial that would have played throughout the 90s, especially with that horn pickup. Hell, what threw me the most was that synth bass on ‘No Chances’, which sounds like it was pulled straight from an Ayreon song from 01011001 - I dunno if Tyler Joseph even knows of that progressive metal act, but the tone is instantly recognizable, even if any deeper parallels might be coincidental.

In fact, the last two songs on the album are such a jarring tonal shift that you have to consider it intentional - the mix gets deeper and heavier and more atmospheric, the synths get colder, the integration of choral vocals on ‘No Chances’, the percussion feels more programmed… it’s almost like the uneasy, foreboding cloud lurking around every edge of the entire album has finally swept into view, and it feels like the pitch-black tones that suffocated Trench have roared back into the picture. Now a lot of fans have highlighted the continuity that resumes in earnest with this moment, trying to figure out how this all ties into the ‘Dema’ and the banditos - I recommend checking out my review of Trench for where I try to explain the lore and roots to the symbolism - but if we’re looking at themes, keep in mind that the last album was torn between the wild, untamed and unpredictable artistic impulses that desperately wanted to break free and the sympathetic but ossifying forces that wanted to keep Tyler Joseph’s creative ambitions locked in place, which includes both his own Blurryface-esque insecurities but also expanded to target their roots in both the industry and maybe even the fanatical fanbase that they already had to try and ward off years earlier! And before said fanbase tries to eat me alive, keep in mind that the framing of the Dema has always been morally ambiguous - even where across this album they come across as kind of implacable… or inevitable. Because while this album was not written with a chronological flow in mind, you can tell how Tyler Joseph knew how it was going to start and end in his creative diversions - Scaled And Icy was always going to have a dark, melancholic ending, which might be why Joseph’s nasal vocals are never able to sell the upbeat cheeriness of the Americana he’s appropriating. And sure, some of that feeds into the realistic juxtaposition of simpler vibes undercut with something darker, but what are the roots that darkness here - hell, some of the moments when Tyler Joseph sound most animated are on ‘Bounce Man’ and ‘Shy Away’ - songs where the underlying message is for someone to get out, either chase their dreams or avoid some dark consequence chasing them. Emphasis on the ‘get out’, part because maybe what’s coming isn’t really after them, but coming for Tyler Joseph instead.

And this is where things get really interesting with Scaled And Icy, because Joseph has emphasized that the title is short for ‘scaled back and isolated’ - recorded primarily in quarantine back home, this is an album that feels like a retreat or going into hiding, moving into more “comfortable” territory. There’s a thick current of anxiety running through the entire project, as to when it’s all going to implode, but there are moments where it feels like Joseph is finding a comfort zone - maybe not clarity but stability. It’s where he’s more plainspoken in describing his implosions on ‘Choker’, where even as he says ‘nobody’s coming for me’ he can’t quite escape the trail of denial that ran through ‘Good Day’ - where he knows the industry is ripping them off wholesale on the clunky ‘The Outside’ - probably the weakest song on the album - but questions how much of that is built on them already being obsolete, regional at best. And yet for as hollow as it might feel on the surface, as the album builds into its middle section you can tell Joseph is trying to reassemble the pieces, do the quiet hard work of self-care - ‘Saturday’ is disaffected but there’s structure being found, ‘Never Take It’ has him tear away from the living hell that was media in late 2020 by learning a new instrument, where you can tell he’s got a death grip on that veneer of ignorance he wants to preserve, and both ‘Mulberry Street’ and ‘Formidable’ have him recognizing how out of place he feels in a bigger environment and how much he cherishes a real connection that has stuck by thick and thin. If we’re looking at a throughline being strengthened and reinforced across this album it is family - which if you know twenty one pilots has been a topic and subtext they value a lot more in their art than many of their peers - and given how quarantine reinforced that isolated lockdown, you can see just how much Joseph clung to those connections, especially his wife.

But it was never built to stay like that, and like with Blurryface’s final two cuts, as the quarantines lift and the world opens up they’re coming for him, to drag him back into the larger world, force him to leave a stability he’s built for himself to be the icon yet again - and this is where I have to bring back that moral ambiguity because this is not an easy answer for him. If we take ‘No Chances’ as the moment when the Dema returns and expand on the metaphor - reinforced by how Tyler Joseph said the song’s choral presentation was inspired by stadium concerts, which is so telling - it highlights how the bandidos didn’t just take off for the hinterlands but went underground, went to drill into the old-fashioned roots of Tyler Joseph’s creativity and to rebuild from scratch what might give him the most peace. Yeah it might be corny and dated and he can’t quite escape the lingering feeling of dread that he will be found and pulled back into the larger world - and it’s quietly ironic that he winds up making even more ‘commercial’ music as a result, but in a way I find that very revealing of where Joseph finds his emotional core and I kind of really appreciate that it’s more ‘normal’ than everyone would expect - but he was on the path to some form of peace. But those deeper insecurities, that industry, that fanbase, they were always going to find them. And that’s why ‘Redecorate’ hits so hard - he knows he’s got to leave that home he’s building, a goner back on the road, and in the first two verses he frames the question of what he leaves behind. Note that he does want to go on some level - the moral ambiguity is in frame, he’s not castigating everyone that wants twenty one pilots back in the world - but he talks about a parent losing a child and whether they leave that child’s bedroom as the same or redecorate, so not only is the family connection first and foremost but he’s also conscious of legacy, reinforced by the final verse where he moves subtext into text and places this album’s stream of creativity as he himself references as the focal point. You can tell he’s openly questioning all of this, and he’s wondering if this is going to be a part of his legacy whether he should do it all over again: maybe it’s because he feels it’s compromised by the label or tepid, maybe it’s because it’s revealing of a self-care journey that doesn’t really look good in full view - when Open Mike Eagle made Anime, Trauma & Divorce last year we saw the truth in that, another album all about family - or maybe it’s because this is what the bandido always wanted to do, and this was his moment of escape.

…you know, on my first half dozen listens to this album I was underwhelmed - and again, if you were someone coming onboard with the monstrous dark swell of Trench, or you were a diehard fan before Vessel and Blurryface, I get why you might consider this Blurryface Pt. 2, now complete with ripping off all their imitators. And indeed, I can see this as an album that actively works against itself - it’s their most commercial and pop but so aware of the underlying hollowness that it creeps through every pore, an album desperate to put on an earnest show but never can properly sell it when wracked with the anxiety it should be doing something “better”, where you can argue it’s all self-consumed wank and I don’t even think I can disagree! And the album that it reminds me the most of is Taylor Swift’s reputation, another tangled pop mess eating its own tail to barely conceal the numbness within… but there’s a therapeutic element to both albums, and Scaled And Icy is acutely aware of every step within it, and the complexities that come with it, a command of atmosphere that Swift never even attempted to hold. And as such… I know I’m weird when it comes to my twenty one pilots takes, but this might be my hottest to date: even if I think Trench has stronger highlights, I think I like Scaled And Icy as the better album. It’s deceptively lower stakes but it meets them, it builds tension with a lot of subtlety, there’s an emotional core to this album that could often feel disconnected on Trench, and that pop sensibility that’s always been twenty one pilots’ greatest underappreciated strength is back at the forefront, and a tighter and more openly populist project. That said, I don’t know how you can appreciate this album as much without the larger context of continuity, and even if I appreciate Mike Elizondo and Greg Kurstin providing some noticeable solid punch-ups to the production, I would agree that in terms of standalone pop songs it could lack some truly killer flair; strong if occasionally unconventional hooks, but not the best this band has ever written. But for me.. I’m a sucker for this thematic territory and twenty one pilots in pop, where their sheer craftsmanship puts them on top of so many of their competition, and with that added level of polish I might even like this more than Vessel. 8/10, I think this is going to be one of the most widely dismissed and misunderstood albums of 2021, and even if I would agree it’s a grower, it’s one that deserves a bigger chance.