Twenty Øne Pilots - Trench | Review

Tyler Joseph and Josh Dunn are back at it with their newly released album, Trench. The album has brought through a lot of excitement about how they will approach their sound since they've been slowly changing since their first self-titled album in 2009.

Trench Album Cover

On the 5th October 2018, Twenty Øne Pilots released their newest album, Trench. Trench is their first album since 2015 following up Blurryface, a very well received album that reached the UK Top 10s in the charts for 5 weeks! Tyler and Josh pre-released 4 of their songs from the new album including Jumpsuit, Levitate, My Blood, and Nico and the Niners, leaving the album at no.1 in the charts post-release date.

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The album sees a variety of changes in the band, mostly in their sound; Tyler uses his infamous screams considerably less (though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing) and it appears the two have decided to go more with the music of the time. Trench is much more modern pop as opposed to their old ‘alternative’ style, some alternative/rock sounds can definitely still be heard but there are a few songs that entirely made to fit in with the sounds at the moment. Morph definitely does this in with the way Tyler sings and Josh is calmer with his amazing drumming skills. I don’t really like this song because of that fact, though there’s nothing particularly wrong with the song, I just feel like it’s not where the band is supposed to be with their sound. Levitate does exactly what it says though, it lifts TØP out of this compliant theme and shows us a bit of the old ‘Vessel’ Twenty Øne Pilots that helped a lot of us through a lot of things. Tyler graces us with his brilliant screams and there’s a bit of ‘Migraine’ style rapping making a come back.

The album isn’t all about it’s sound though, Trench shows a very deep undertone with the lyrics in some of the songs, like Bandito. I wouldn’t say the song itself stands out very dramatically to me but the lyrics are something I love. Tyler says the lines ‘I created this world / To feel some control’ which I interpret to be talking about his albums and the world Trench is set in in particular. This is very powerful as it shows how in the real world, they’re not really feeling in control of their lives and that’s where they’ve decided to set up and develop something amazing. This is suggested by Riddell from Coup de Main Magazine when she mentions how the world Tyler talks about is something he’s spent years developing inside the album, Trench. Overall this album is fairly decent, for sure there are let downs in their insistence to sound like everyone else but some songs like Levitate and Jumpsuit just save it to make some songs, absolute bops.

7/10