Twenty One Pilots Want to Stay Strange

The thinking, the group’s 29-year-old singer and songwriter Tyler Joseph said, was that other groups were practically begging: “It was just a bombardment of ‘come see us play.'” So Joseph and drummer Josh Dun played tiny, unpromoted gigs on any nearby bill they could join, leaving strong impressions with their theatrical antics and genre-agnostic songs. Eventually, they’d announce a big hometown show, go all-out — lights, grander stunts, fresh set lists — and tell everyone to be there.

They did this for two years. Then they played a concert in 2011 where 1,700 fans showed up. So did representatives from 12 record labels.

“In Columbus they were the Beatles,” said Pete Ganbarg, the president of A&R for Atlantic Records. (The band signed to Fueled by Ramen, the then-Atlantic Records Group label known for releasing emo and pop-punk bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco.) “But you go over city limits, and nobody knew who they were.”

Joseph said the duo wasn’t dreaming big then. “We were trying to raise up out of the local scene,” he said. “Then it started to translate regionally. And then I don’t remember anything.”

The group’s 2015 breakout album, “Blurryface,” featuring the anxiety anthem “Stressed Out,” went triple platinum. The track — known for its sing-songy chorus where Joseph longs for childhood comforts — has over 1.5 billion YouTube plays. The only bigger artists in 2016 were Drake, Beyoncé and Adele, according to Nielsen Music. Their arena tour supporting the album — just the two musicians balancing a spectacular physical and emotional high-wire act — played 114 sold-out dates. They are so beloved here in their hometown that conducting an interview at Donatos, a pizza chain based in the city that gave Dun, now 30, his first job, felt like coordinating a clandestine mission.

“I think what makes them successful is they don’t sound like anyone else,” said Tom Poleman, the chief programming officer for the radio giant iHeartMedia, who said the band’s songs played on multiple formats. “There’s something about his voice that’s incredibly innocent and sweet-sounding, and then there’s this intense emotion and energy. It’s unexpected, but it feels right at the same time.”

In July, when the group returned from a yearlong blackout — no concerts, no social media — its die-hard fans (known as the Skeleton Clique, or just the Clique) set the internet ablaze. “Trench,” the follow-up to “Blurryface,” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard chart this week, behind the soundtrack to “A Star Is Born.”

Despite those impressive numbers, it’s also possible you have never heard of Twenty One Pilots. That’s partly because the music they make, filled with urgent lyrics about loyalty and beating back darkness, feels laser-targeted at young people searching for answers, meaning, community or solace. (It also tells an ongoing good vs. evil narrative featuring a set of recurring characters, which listeners pick over online like Trekkies.) It’s partly because Joseph and Dun are private, low-key guys who don’t fill their social media with a splashy array of famous friends. And it’s partly because of the band’s nearly compulsive desire to stay glued to the path that brought them here today: Keep the team small. Keep the mission pure. Focus on the live show. Be earnest.

But now Twenty One Pilots are facing a host of questions: Was their blockbuster breakout a one-time thing? Can they reach the masses again with an album that’s as stubbornly, gloriously bizarre as “Blurryface” while holding on to their integrity?

“Consumers believe, including me, that if something gets all the way to them without them asking for it, then there had to have been some sort of scheme,” Joseph said. “When actually, some things just happen to get there.”

The band’s name serves as a reminder of its goals: Joseph plucked it from the 1947 Arthur Miller play “All My Sons,” in which a World War II airplane-parts supplier learns his products are faulty and sends them out anyway, leading to the deaths of 21 pilots. Faced with career options that may not jibe with their intentions, the two ask each other if a decision will be “sending out the parts.”

He started frequenting a Guitar Center near his house, where he practiced on an electronic set “because I was very sensitive to how loud they were and how bad I was,” he said. Around age 13, he drew up a contract with his parents to secure a real drum set, in which he promised to maintain his grades and keep “inappropriate” CDs out of the house.

Joseph, an intense but charming conversationalist who likes to spin extended metaphors, had similarly come from a nonmusical family. His mother taught him at home for a handful of years; he returned to school in seventh grade, in time to play on the basketball team. (He was offered a scholarship to play at nearby Otterbein University. His competitive edge remains one of his most indelible characteristics.)

On a rainy afternoon when he was a teenager, he turned to an unused Christmas gift stashed in a closet — a keyboard — and hit the play button. Pachelbel’s Canon blared from its tiny speakers, and Joseph was transfixed. “I was like, man, I want to learn how to do that,” he said. Once he figured out the basics, “I realized, wait, every song I’ve ever heard is inside of here, inside these keys. Then I would turn the radio on and I would figure out chords.”

He plunked out songs by Billy Joel, Gavin DeGraw and Coldplay, but kept his focus on writing his own. (In 2016, Chris Martin left him a complimentary voicemail he has never deleted.) Today, he plays and writes on keyboards, bass and ukulele. The band remains guitar-free. Joseph’s drive to create was sudden and overwhelming, and hasn’t waned. He has said the “Blurryface” character is partially a manifestation of his insecurities, and he performed live during that era with his hands and neck slathered in black grease paint meant to symbolize anxiety’s perilous grip.

“I feel like there’s a certain level of transparency that is healthy to talk about, like, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the way that I sound,” he said of his songwriting motivations. “But then there are certain other things that are seemingly a little bigger and more volatile.” Those are the things he won’t share with a reporter nibbling on flat-crust pizza.

“They call this our fifth record, can you believe that?” Joseph suddenly interjected, referring to “Trench.” What would he consider it? “The third.” The group’s two albums in 2009 and 2011 were merely products he tossed together for the merchandise table.

“Vessel,” from 2013, marks the band’s fresh start after signing to Fueled by Ramen. When the label suggested the producer Greg Wells (Katy Perry, Weezer), Joseph’s control-freak impulses faced their first test. They did not fare well.

“I was a young kid who was like, don’t touch my music,” he said. A few years later, he walked into the “Blurryface” sessions with the experienced producers Ricky Reed (Jason Derulo, Kesha) and Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Fiona Apple) with nearly complete tracks, again trying to minimize others’ fingerprints on his work, though he complimented their contributions and said they gave him tools to move forward.

“Blurryface,” the album that thrust Joseph and Dun onto the MTV Video Music Awards, “Saturday Night Live” and Grammys stages, was written on the road, with the band conceiving each new track as a slot in the set list.

“On tour there’s a lot of nothingness. So deciding what to do with your time can really make or break your career,” Joseph said. The fact that the Pilots don’t party kept them productive and sharp: “There’s something tempting about how cool it feels to treat the show like it doesn’t matter,” he said. “And that’s when you start treating your body in ways where it makes it harder for you to actually perform the show that you set out to do.”

Since the band’s earliest days, live performances have been a crucible, a way of speaking its purpose and maintaining an unusually symbiotic relationship with its fans. Even when there were five listeners in the room, Joseph ended each show by saying, “We’re Twenty One Pilots, and so are you.” Their Emotional Roadshow tour for “Blurryface” was crammed with grand gestures and spectacle — Joseph leaping and planting himself atop tall objects with his arms outstretched or tearing off masks; Dun losing pieces of his red-and-black suit until he was bare-chested, smashing his drums with an unrelenting precision — that built a complex arc of energy and emotions.

“It was always like, what can we get away with — how much responsibility can we put on the audience?” Joseph said. “Hey, if this doesn’t work, it’s your fault. And they always show up, because they do not want to fail.”

Being a Twenty One Pilots fan can mean losing yourself in the thrilling aesthetic juxtapositions and dramatic crests of the band’s music. But it also comes in jolts of excitement from unlocking the symbolism hidden in everything from color schemes to website file names — and feeling like a member of a mysterious club where everyone’s fumbling around in the dark, sometimes frantically, sometimes euphorically, searching for their identities.

For a year, Joseph toiled daily in his home studio, with the support of his wife, Jenna, and less contact with Dun, who lives in Los Angeles, than ever before. “It almost destroyed me,” Joseph said. “There were moments I was like, I’m just going to wither away, I want to change my identity and pretend like I didn’t have to follow up this record.” The label backed him, Atlantic’s Ganbarg said. “I never really needed to have the talk with him where it was like, ‘yeah, I think you need help,’ because he didn’t.”

Writing and producing the album solo (with assists from Paul Meany of the band Mutemath), Joseph was constantly switching creative hats. And his psychological state whiplashed, too: “There was also a flip-flop between ‘I’m not good enough to be doing this’ and this other thing that crept in all the time, which was ‘I’m the best in the world.'”

“Trench” tells a story about a place called Dema from which a character named Clancy struggles to escape. (There’s a lot more to it than that.)

In its lyrics, Joseph returns to terms — jumpsuit, bishop — that give him sparks. “I love words and the ability to kind of fill them with meaning,” he said. “There’s something about the narrative, where it’s that same feeling of, you can either be completely overcome with the vastness of endless possibility or you can be excited about it and try to go somewhere no one’s ever gone before. People say there’s nothing new, and I’m constantly trying to prove them wrong.”

On “Levitate,” Joseph peels off crisp raps about nerves and cultural overexposure. “The Hype” is a ‘90s-style rock track about loyalty and perseverance. “Chlorine,” a song that describes how creativity can cleanse dark impulses but cause its own pain, includes moments of Thom Yorke-like vocal transcendence.

Which leads to a somewhat personal question: Is Joseph OK? “I’m OK today,” he said. But he isn’t always. “It doesn’t seem like it’s something that will be fully solved,” he added, which plays into the cyclical nature of the album’s narrative, as Clancy attempts to escape over and over again and go someplace else. “At the end of the record you feel like I should say ‘and then I got to that place,’ but I don’t say that.”

“And maybe one day I will tell you where that place is, and what it’s called and what it feels like, and what the weather’s like,” he added. When he was a child, his father told him something that’s stuck with him: “It’s OK to start over.” It’s a message he tries to convey on “Trench.”

“Even though you’ll make progress,” he said, “when you do inevitably take a step backwards, or a few steps backwards, or a gigantic leap backwards, that’s not the end of the fight.”