I have been super excited because twenty one pilots are releasing a new album, only a year after dropping Clancy. I went to see them live during the Clancy tour, and it was one of the best shows I've ever been to. Tyler and Josh are incredible musicians and spectacular showmen. When I saw the follow up was coming so soon, I was over the moon. The first single dropped about a week ago, and it slaps. The melody is already firmly implanted in my brain, never to leave. I don't understand how Tyler Jospeh can make so many unforgettable melodies.

But I wonder about the lyrics. Over the past several albums, the group has been doing two things at once. They've been exploring Tyler's mind, life, joys, and struggles with mental illness. But at the same time, they've been crafting a fictional narrative as an allegory through which to explore those themes. A lot of their hardcore fans (myself included) are now invested in this fictional narrative, and I'm looking forward to the resolution to the story about the bishops and trench and using antlers to control the bodies of dead people. But the reason that this works, and the reason that we're invested in the fictional story, is precisely because it works as an allegory for the issues of real life. A jumpsuit works as an allegory for my mental defenses against anxiety. The surveillance state described in No Chances or Mulberry Street makes me think about my relationships with others and the kinds of things I tell myself and them to help cope with the anxieties of modern life. Lavish explores both the success and fame of the band in the real world as well as how the fictional Clancy's fame is used by the bishops of City to exert control. It works because it works on both levels at once.

I'm worried that The Contract goes a little too far into only serving the fictional narrative and not working as an allegory. Maybe it will make more sense in light of the rest of the album, and the allegorical nature of it will fit clearer once I know the whole story. But at the moment, I can't really tell how it would work as a direct allegory by itself without the rest of the story. Now, of course, stories and fiction don't need to be allegorical. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is famously not an allegory, and its characters and plot are wonderful because their resonance with the human condition is deeper than a simple allegory. If Tyler and Josh want to go that direction, dropping simple allegory completely and just finishing their fictional story, then they are totally free to do so in the upcoming album, and maybe it will be awesome. I would be lying if I didn't say I was worried, though.

Two specific worries come up. The first is that a music album isn't the most direct and clear way to tell a story, and the second is that pure storytelling is not what has brought Tyler and Josh success so far, and so I don't know how this will go. These two worries are deeply connected. Part of the success of the allegorical narrative so far is that it isn't complete. Fans have had to comb through lyrics to uncover hidden meanings. New music videos instantly got tons of views from fans trying to pick out subtle hints about the narrative. The fact that these were just normal songs with a subtle undercurrent of fictional narrative meant that the songs stood just fine on their own, and both devoted fans digging for clues and normal people listening to a good song were satisfied. If twenty one pilots are pivoting to pure storytelling, this conceit that has worked well so far is not longer possible. The narrative comes front and center, and needs significantly more detail and completeness in order to function. Whereas before the gaps and subtle hints are what actually made it compelling, now it needs to not have gaps and the hints can no longer be subtle. And it raises the question: will it become too self-referential in order to appeal to a wider audience? Again, it's totally fine if Tyler and Josh want to just wrap up the story for their diehard fans and not worry about the broader public. But I wonder if even those diehard fans will be satisfied if the music stops functioning as a compelling allegory and just becomes about the fictional world.

Tyler himself seems aware of this tension that's causing my worried. The lyrics in Bandito run, “I created this world | to feel some control | I can destroy it if I want…” This expresses the artificiality of the narrative world started in Trench and running through this upcoming album. This in itself isn't a bad thing, again - stories, fiction, and allegory are all beautiful art forms that have helped communicate a profound depth of meaning for centuries, and the band has been doing this well. But it seems like there's a tension, or a possible temptation, to collapse into the fictional world in a merely self-referential way that loses touch with the deeper meaning that made the fantasy compelling in the first place. I have a lot of faith in Tyler and Josh. I think they've published some of the most lyrically and artistically compelling music in the past decade. Hopefully they can avoid this pitfall.

This also leads me to reflect on my own writing. Emo music in general runs this same risk of falling into a kind of self-referential emotivism. It isn't a fictional world with fictional characters, but rather myself, caricatured and turned into a performative display of the kinds of feelings I'm supposed to write songs about. The best emo bands (in my opinion, anyway) have always approached this temptation with a kind of tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation. It's silly at a certain point for a band, especially later in their career, to be writing about heartbreak as if they were teenagers and not a bunch of thirty-year-olds. I think the music video for Emery's “People Always Ask Me if We're Gonna Cuss in an Emery Song” (what a title!). The band try and perform like they used to when they were kids and strain a bunch of muscles, in a song reflecting on the weight of individual words in their music and everyday life. It's beautiful.

Hopefully we can keep the right spirit about it while we're writing new music ourselves. We've got several new songs lined up for our summer parish festival shows, and as a band we've gotten a bit louder and heavier. There's some dark and emotional themes in the lyrics. I'll let you all be the judges of how well we've navigated the tension.