Firmly entrenched: After huge success with 2015’s thematically cryptic Blurryface, Twenty One Pilots entered into a period of “going dark” for a year, which singer Tyler Joseph says was needed to bring authenticity back to the music and battle some unspecified personal demons. When the duo released its follow-up, Trench, in 2018, its fanbase, better known as the Skeleton Clique, went on gleeful searches to decode the record’s hidden meanings. Joseph and drummer Josh Dun offered clues online and in songs that referred to earlier releases, further populating the band’s imagined universe with characters who convey stories about insecurity and the interplay between the darkness and light that fuels the pair’s artistic process.
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