In the pit below me, a buff young man lifted another man on his shoulders. When the band took the stage, in bank-robber ski masks, the audience-which was all ages, with plenty of thirty-year-olds mixed in with the teen-agers-collectively, hysterically screamed. The arena was full, the crowd was restless, and the air was playoff-game electric. It was the last stop of the first leg of their hundred-and-nineteen-night world tour. Last Thursday, I met up with everyone else to attend Twenty One Pilots’ second sold-out show in Madison Square Garden. “Where was I, in relation to everyone else?” “What else didn’t I know about?” he asked. 3 song in America was a band he’d never heard of. Earlier this year, in the Times Magazine, Jayson Greene, an editor at Pitchfork, wrote about his realization that the band with the No. This amalgamated aesthetic is catnip to a significant portion of American listeners but functions like an invisibility cloak against music writers. Name any white-male-fronted musical act from the past two decades that’s achieved significant commercial success while inspiring critical apathy, and you will hear that sound in Twenty One Pilots, if you listen long enough.

They sound like Jason Mraz and Panic! at the Disco, Coldplay and 311, Walk the Moon and Imagine Dragons and Porter Robinson. But they also switch between E.D.M., dubstep, rap, reggae, nu-metal, ukulele folk, glam rock, and piano balladeering at card-trick speed. The duo is signed to Fueled by Ramen, an imprint probably best known for putting out the work of Fall Out Boy, and they share an insistent puerility and melodic flamboyance with their pop-punk labelmates. Joseph and Dun are devoted Christians from Columbus, Ohio, and they combine a kind of stalwart Midwesternness with a genre fluidity that feels deployed to confound.

But they become harder to categorize the more you listen. As of last week, they became the first “alternative” band to land two singles in the Top Ten of the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously: “Heathens,” from the “Suicide Squad” soundtrack, and the emo-reggae track “Ride.” Meanwhile, “Stressed Out,” their calling card, still hovers in the thirties.Īll three songs share the dirtbag camaraderie of Joseph’s delivery and a certain paranoiac groove. But it’s not that: Twenty One Pilots keep charting. The song is so idiosyncratic-a lyrical, emo, rap-rock song about a boy’s need for his mommy-that it’s got a whiff of the one-hit wonder. He rhymes “student loans,” which are bad, with “treehouse homes,” which are good he bemoans the people who say, “Wake up, you need to make money.” Behind his wholesome flow, the instrumentation sweetens an arpeggiated piano softens the snap of the drummer Josh Dun’s beat. On the verses of “Stressed Out,” he raps, with a taut, earnest bounce that recalls Macklemore or Gym Class Heroes. Joseph is a dexterous front man, a chameleon between songs as well as within them. “If we could turn back time,” Joseph sings, “to the good old da-ays, when our mama sang”-and here’s where your ears might prick up in recognition-“us to sleep, but now we’re stressed out.” Tyler Joseph, the twenty-seven-year-old vocalist and songwriter for the band, composes in hooks his melodies sound like bar darts swooping toward a bull’s-eye, and the “Stressed Out” chorus is as bright as its minor key will allow. You may not be familiar with Twenty One Pilots-they’re a slippery phenomenon, selling out arenas while remaining nearly invisible to those outside their active fan base-but you’d know the hook of “Stressed Out” if you heard it: the song has enjoyed non-stop airplay for almost a year. A year later, those men have become the biggest new band in America. Last summer, pop radio began playing a fiendish earworm about two young men who feared the ordinary demands of adulthood. Twenty One Pilots are selling out arenas on their current world tour while remaining nearly invisible to those outside their active fan base.

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