Trench: The story of twenty one pilots’ most ambitious album ever

Last summer, Tyler Joseph phoned Josh Dun with an unusual topic to discuss. It was a few days after twenty one pilots had wrapped up their spectacular five-night Tour De Columbus, the final shows on 2015 LP Blurryface’s touring cycle. Tyler had subsequently gone on a beach holiday with his family, but he couldn’t resist ringing his best friend to let him know what was on his mind.

Josh listened as the 29-year-old detailed Trench: a world where nine dictatorial bishops keep the inhabitants (Tyler included) of a fictional place named Dema from escaping its controlling clutches, with the help of the Banditos – a rebel organisation (featuring Josh). This far-reaching yet intricate narrative, Tyler explained, was to become twenty one pilots’ next album.

Josh absorbed this barrage of information and thought, “What have you gotten yourself into?!”

“It was like he ate a wrong berry or something,” the drummer jokes to Kerrang! today, as his bandmate bursts out laughing next to him. “Like he’d gotten super high…”

Truth be told, Tyler had secretly been thinking up the Trench storyline years before his getaway. Now, the time had finally come to introduce it to the world. And though Josh was initially startled by the concept, it wasn’t long before he found himself on board.

When K! first catch up with twenty one pilots to find out about their most ambitious venture yet, the duo are not quite themselves. There’s visible tension in their bodies; a sense of apprehension in their eyes. It’s two hours before showtime at their feverishly anticipated live comeback at London’s O2 Academy Brixton – their first gig in some 444 days – and they simply can’t relax.

On any other day, the pair would typically be heard finishing each other’s sentences, laughing at in-jokes, and generally making the more mundane aspects of being in a band look as fun as playing onstage. Not today, though. Dressed in black, save for a dark-blue beanie covering his newly buzzed haircut, Josh is the marginally calmer of the two, spending time away from K!’s photoshoot in conversation with his girlfriend, Debby. But Tyler, wearing a bright yellow jacket despite the solemn mood, can’t seem to rid himself of the anxious expression on his face. The air is still. Between poses, he stays silent.

Tyler gently shuffles over to one of the venue’s upstairs windows, glancing down at the hundreds of fans in the queue below, all covered head-to-toe in dark green garments and yellow tape. It is the mark of the Trench era.

His face temporarily breaks into an enormous grin, spreading from cheek to cheek. But then he turns his back, and the jitters resume once more.

In order to get themselves into the headspace to write a follow-up to Blurryface – the most successful release of their career thus far – twenty one pilots first had to search for a little perspective. One day, Tyler Joseph fortuitously found the outlook he was craving from an unlikely source.

“One of my great aunts said to me, ‘Well, I know you heard that the hospital closed down, so it’s been a tough transition,’” he remembers. “I knew she worked at the hospital, but I did not know that it was closing down. But in her world, it was the number one biggest thing to her. And I was so inspired by that realisation – that we all have our reality that feels like the most important thing. She had worked there for years and years, and to dive into her world, and to learn from her perspective, was so refreshing. And towards the end of the Blurryface cycle, it really did feel like the world started to revolve around what we were doing, and that didn’t quite feel right…”

Tyler’s not wrong. Their fourth album not only catapulted the band on to the world’s biggest stages, it also made history as the first-ever record to have each of its songs certified (at least) Gold – the equivalent of one million sales. As they made headlines on an almost daily basis, it’s no surprise twenty one pilots felt a little uneasy with the situation.

With more eyes on them than ever before, Tyler and Josh also found themselves battling a constant stream of self-doubt. Given that Blurryface (the album) explored these topics via its titular character, this isn’t surprising in the slightest. Still, despite a burgeoning fanbase and never-ending list of accomplishments, the pair quickly learned that fame and fortune simply isn’t a cure.

“There’s certain things that you work through, as a human,” explains Tyler. “Obviously, there’s things where it’s like, ‘Are we good enough to play music for a living? Are we good enough to write songs and show people what we’re made of?’ As things got bigger, there was some confidence instilled in us – like, ‘You know what? Actually we can do this…’ But there are also a lot of aspects of doubt and insecurity that the level of success doesn’t even affect. And, partially, I’m glad, because I don’t necessarily want that external reward to solve some sort of internal issue. I think that Josh and I will take every stage with a bit of needing to overcome something, and wanting to work through something. We never want to feel completely comfortable; we want people to see us working through something, and for us to struggle, and see a bit of turmoil and chaos.”

Have you ever been at risk of going through the motions onstage?

“Hmm…” Tyler pauses. “I would say that there was an aspect towards the end of the touring cycle for Blurryface where we started to feel like we knew what to expect at each show. And we didn’t like that. We don’t want to take the stage going, ‘I know exactly what’s going to happen tonight.’ As that started to sink in, it really started to make sense that we should wrap it up, and dive into creating this new music.”

One night, deep into the creation of Trench, Tyler woke up in the dead of night and started to second-guess himself. Just hours prior, he’d been asked to send the album’s final tracklist off. The physical production process was about to commence.

“Tyler, are you sure that this is the order?” he was asked.

“Yes, this is the order,” the musician replied.

“Alright, well there’s no turning back now…”

Such is Tyler’s level of care and standard of artistic consideration, Trench was, of course, as it should have been. But there was one particular song that he’d suddenly thought twice about.

“I was just like, ‘Neon Gravestones, is that in the right spot?’” whispers Tyler, recounting his stirring in the darkness. He turned on the lights, got up and scanned the tracklist again, listening along to the songs at the same time.

“I had this moment of, ‘You have to own it. You have to own it being number seven, right in the middle. It’s where it should be…’” he recalls. “There were outside opinions that had heard these songs that were saying, ‘This could be an issue to have it right in the middle of the record; it does potentially mess with whatever someone’s version of a flow is.’ But I just felt it was so important to be right there.”

Neon Gravestones, Tyler proudly explains, is the heart of Trench. In an album otherwise surrounded by career-best rapping passages (Levitate), explosive basslines (Jumpsuit), gloriously catchy melodies (Chlorine), and a newfound sense of “ballsy” production (Pet Cheetah), its impact comes from moving spoken-word segments and exquisite subtleties. But even more important is its powerful anti-suicide message.

The songwriting process is a delicate one for Tyler Joseph – it always has been. With Trench, though, the frontman took the concept of getting lost in his music – and his own head – to a whole new level.

And not only does the album apply a theory of looking at the mind geographically (“You start to realise that there is a bit of a map…” Tyler ponders), the ideas behind Trench’s central reference point, Dema, also pertain to what twenty one pilots were going through at the time of the record’s formation: a transitional phase between cycles.

“Ultimately,” Tyler begins, “it’s the story of emotions that one would feel when they’re between two places. And that can apply to a lot of people’s lives – being between jobs, or schools, or seasons. And, I guess, that Trench represents that feeling in between two places. That’s the broadest way to look at it. But as you zoom in, it can mean a lot of other things, too.”

Musically, Trench required a similarly analytical approach, not to mention an equally captivating take on twenty one pilots’ genre-melding sound to keep up with the album’s grand vision.

“Nothing ever hit me in the wrong way,” Josh affirms, when asked if he ever disagreed with where Tyler wanted to take things. “I think that he gravitates to cool, tasteful music – which is why I wanted to play music with him in the first place (laughs).”

Josh approved of what he was hearing, but Tyler never stopped scrutinising. Though he didn’t set himself a schedule while in his basement studio, time flew by when the frontman cracked a new musical arrangement, until he would “kind of snap out of it and realise, ‘Oh, I’ve been down here for 10 hours.’” Tyler talks passionately of the “hundreds of ideas” that he had, of how he’d try to use the night as a time to reset his brain, and of how he found moments away from the studio just as inspiring as time in it. If writer’s block ever struck – and it did – he’d go and “pout” on his porch, or distract himself by watching TV shows with his wife, Jenna.