Twenty One Pilots are back with a new song, “The Contract,” which serves as the lead single for their new concept album Breach. The record is set to be the climactic finale of the five-album narrative that began with 2015’s Blurryface (the one with mega hits “Stressed Out” and “Ride”). After last year’s Clancy — which leaned even harder into the lore-driven, narrative epic-style they’re going for — “The Contract” is intended to be something of a ‘first episode’ for the concluding saga, picking up at the cliffhanger moment they left off at in their prior album.
It’s awful.
If you’re reading this and you’ve always shared a disdain for the Ohio duo’s hybrid pop-rock-rap experiments, this does not come as a surprise. But if you’re reading this and are one of the thousands of Twenty One Pilots superfans, you might think calling “The Contract” a total disaster is a bit unfair, given the scope of this long-running narrative they’ve been constructing and how much effort they’ve put into to world-building, easter eggs, and other smart exercises in fan engagement.
That’s definitely true; I am very impressed by how much Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun have committed to the bit. Artists have long attempted concept albums and several have used multiple consecutive records to track an over-arching narrative. No one has really done it for an entire decade across five albums, and when you look at the incredible numbers this band has done in terms of streams, ticket sales, and growing their audience, Twenty One Pilots are justifiably in their own lane and have achieved this through embracing transmedia storytelling.
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I say all that just to reiterate that this new song is a complete mess, a sloppy hodge-podge of genres and styles that directly compete with one another from moment to moment. It’s fine to do concept songs — welcome, even — but their insistence on tying in these extensive, high-stakes kernels of lore does not help the final product. The story is only impactful if the song is good on its own, and that is not the case here. Jumping into “The Contract” without any of the thematic context is like watching Avengers: Endgame as your first Marvel movie: It’s probably great for those in the know, but it’s mostly just incoherent noise and meaningless action.
Divorced from whatever narrative is taking place (which, judging by the music video, is some crazy sci-fi fantasy nonsense better left in a teenager’s sketchbook), “The Contract” is a challenge sonically. There’s a nu-metal twist, autotuned muttering, a corny rap verse, and melodies that feel more concerned with jamming in words than landing with weight; the way Joseph wraps the word “necromancer” around the melody’s triplet rhythm is grating, but shockingly, the falsetto-laden “Ooooh, promises and contracts” is even worse.
Dun’s quick, busy drumming, the chintzy, dramatic synths clashing with distorted electric guitars, the awful half-time (trap-inspired?) break, the tension between nostalgia ploys (the track absolutely recalls Meteora-era Linkin Park) and contemporary production, Joseph’s unimaginative, generic lines about anxiety, insomnia, and paranoia… all of these elements clashing together makes for a generally bad listening experience and sets Breach up to be an overdramatic mess.
Twenty One Pilots do have some good tunes here and there, but “The Contract” is a worst-case-scenario Twenty One Pilots song. You wouldn’t guess that, given the way the song and music video are currently being received by their fans. Across the YouTube comments section, dozens of sleuths are trying to make sense of the easter eggs and narrative, while others are reacting to the overstuffed music as if it’s a deliberate reference to each of their previous albums. “This isn’t just a song — it’s a breakdown, a memory, a warning all at once,” one fan’s comment reads. “The Contract,” certainly, is for them; the rest of us are left with a collage of scraps and half-hearted ideas.
Twenty One Pilots epitomize the streaming era, where a mix-and-match stylistic strategy and a prioritization of concept, aesthetics, and narrative come over the quality of the music itself. To some fans looking for a more immersive experience with an artist that isn’t, say, Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, Twenty One Pilots have tapped into that energy better than any rock-adjacent act in their corner. Immersion is cool, meta-textual references and lore-heavy offerings are too. But concept or not, if the music behind it is this bad, whatever world-building that comes along is meaningless.
Content shared from consequence.net.