Twenty One Pilots — Scaled and Icy
Has an album you were looking forward to hearing slapped you in the face with its absolute mediocrity? I didn’t expect an already established, well-liked band such as Twenty One Pilots to produce an album like Scaled and Icy — which was an absolute disappointment — but miracles do indeed happen.
Scaled and Icy might be an album that some people would genuinely enjoy — those who haven’t heard of Twenty One Pilots and knows them only by a couple of their more popular songs, for instance — but for someone who has followed them for years, and was anticipating bigger and wider projects with Josh Dun and Tyler Joseph, this album seems to be a step back in terms of creativity and production; sacrificing their unique sound to make a more mainstream album that failed utterly and only left me — and most long time fans — disappointed.
Twenty One Pilots have consistently managed to produce albums that are above average — even when it comes to their arguably least popular and least musically refined self-titled album, it still sounds better than this dumpster fire of an album — Scaled and Icy is a significant step backwards in relation to their songwriting skills and the integrity to their unique sound. Particularly with Trench, the duo established their own, unique sound that recognisably made them different, and though Trench didn’t get the same commercial success that Blurryface did, it gave them a dedicated fanbase, and was still an above-average album that highlighted Joseph’s exemplary songwriting skills that were not to be trifled with.
If there was one thing I had to pick that Scaled and Icy failed to do — among many other failings in this album — it is that the songwriting is bland, carrying none of the emotions that their previous songs like Car Radio from Vessel, and even Neon Gravestones from Trench, conveyed. Good Day, the opening song on Scaled and Icy, only manages to set the expectations low for the rest of the album; while the beat and melody are catchy, the song itself misses the mark, making a frequent listener miss the previous talent that defined them.
Even the singles from this album — Choker, Shy Away and Saturday — follow the same formula: catchy beat, mediocre “rap” that does injustice to every other song from all their previous albums, and extremely mediocre songwriting. Twenty One Pilots’ pathetic attempts to remain mainstream when they clearly don’t need to with their massive fanbase and casual listeners who already like their sound, makes them either innovators or just plain stupid.
I would have been more appreciative of their attempts to be more experimental — if that’s really the word that can be used when an album makes all the efforts to sound like every other album in the market — if their final product didn’t sound more like a pop album than an alternative one, and clearly like the futile attempts of a rock band to sound like a pop band, at that.
As hard as it is to believe, there are some times I actually enjoy the songs in the album — when I don’t think of the album as a Twenty One Pilots album and merely an album that I would listen to on a friend’s recommendation; though in any case, it still would not be an album that I would listen to frequently, and definitely not one that I would add to my Spotify. If Twenty One Pilots were planning on releasing an album that had songs you would listen to on the radio begrudgingly because you have nothing else to listen to and your aux cord is broken, they’ve definitely accomplished that.
Scaled and Icy isn’t a bad album, per se. As I said before, it can even be enjoyed by people who don’t have a prior idea of what Twenty One Pilots has traditionally embodied, and only know them by name or their more mainstream songs — though even they might be surprised by this album since it’s a far cry from Ride and Stressed Out. But as a long-time Twenty One Pilots fan, this album was simply… disappointing and mediocre, especially when you know the extent of their songwriting and how they have created songs that sound much, much better than every song in this album.
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