To the boys of Twenty One Pilots: we wish you’d value albums 1 and 2 as much as we do.
“They call this our fifth record, can you believe that?”, said Tyler Joseph to the New York Times.
He then threw old Twenty One Pilots fans into a tailspin by classifying the band’s first two self-recorded releases as early commercial grabs.
Maybe Tyler doesn’t consider those albums part of the canon, but you can be sure the core fans do.
Album 1 may sound like it was recorded in someone’s basement, but it still charts on the Billboard 200 and has sold tens of thousands of copies. It’s utterly self-indulgent in the best way and represents Tyler in his free artistic form (and least artistically experienced). Every artist needs to spend time indulging their creativity in such a way, especially young artists.
And album 2 (Regional at Best) is a delight. Physical copies of the album are exceedingly rare but unofficial uploads on YouTube have collectively garnered millions of streams.
So why doesn’t Tyler consider albums 1 and 2 part of the official canon?
According to Tyler, the band wasn’t “dreaming big then,” preoccupied I guess with rising up out of the local music scene. Albums 1 and 2 were “merely products he tossed together for the merchandise table.”
Oh really? They don’t seem like it. I’ve spent ten years or so digging through mountains of music as I’ve explored local music scenes searching for talent. I know what a garbage demo sounds like, and neither of these albums has that quality. There are an abundance of major budget album releases that sound like badly produced cash grabs compared to both of these treasures.
It’s impossible for me to listen to albums 1 and 2 and not hear heart, sincerity, passion, and hours of intense work and exemplary attention to detail. Local artists and college-age kids don’t record music of this caliber unless they believe in what they do and already have their sights set on world domination.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard artists dismiss their earlier releases. Maybe there’s just too much cringe in going back to early sketches, especially after a few years of international touring and recording with world-class producers. It must be like looking at your baby photos or remembering your first awkward kiss: a little emasculating, a little embarrassing, and quite vulnerable.
But for fans, these releases are an indulgence in the whimsical appeal of the band’s earliest days. They’re an inseparable part of the band’s identity.
Amateur as they may be, they’re dripping with artistic merit, signal flares of young men from middle America yearning to express profundity and novelty in the midst stereotypical suburban blandness.
Even back then, Tyler was reaching deep into his inner weirdness, far deeper than most of his peers. And while underground musicians often celebrate weirdness in a self-congratulatory way, early Twenty One Pilots weirdness was infused with a warmth and humanity lost on many avant-garde peers.
Expressing your own weirdness requires courage. To do so while retaining humanity and vulnerability requires far more.
But you can’t talk about the early days without bringing up the lack of Josh Dun.
In the early days the band had three members. Tyler was the lead, along with Nick Thomas and Chris Salih. As far as I can tell, Nick and Chris left shortly before Josh joined because they weren’t interested in shooting for the big leagues the way Tyler was. I guess you could say they craved a different kind of buzz.
Josh Dun joined in 2011. He was already a professional, gigging musician. He’d already played on a critically acclaimed album by House of Heroes, been on a national tour, and appeared in a music video (he’s at 3:44). He was already destined for professional success and knew the kind of work ethic required for the big leagues.
So imagine how strong of an impression Tyler, a kid with big dreams and a locally successful band, must have made on Josh when they first met. They talked all night and discovered that their visions aligned astonishingly well.
Two years later, they gave a show to 1,500 people and sat back while a horde of record labels fell over each other trying to sign them to lucrative record deals.
And a few years after that, tickets for the Bandito arena tour went on sale, selling out almost immediately…
So Albums 1 and 2 are preludes. We get it.
They were thrown together by people who barely knew what they were doing.
Albums 3, 4, and 5 were honed by world-renowned producers.
Albums one and two got millions of streams. 3, 4, and 5 have gotten billions.
But albums 1 and 2 are what set Twenty One Pilots apart from the endless universe of equally talented underground musicians craving a fraction of the success Josh and Tyler have experienced. They embody the weirdness, heart, and relatablity that set up Tyler and Josh for careers that are going to last for decades. There would be no blurryface or Trench without albums 1 and 2.
So, no, we’re not going to stop calling Trench album number 5. You may as well ask your Moms to stop looking at your baby pictures.
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