Revered duo Twenty One Pilots aren’t ones to do things in halves. In servitude of that ethos, the band have announced today that fans won’t have to wait very long for their new album, with Scaled and Icy set to drop next month on May 21st. To celebrate the announcement, they’ve shared their fresh clip for lead single ‘Shy Away’.
The record was written and for the most part, produced by vocalist Tyler Joseph throughout the isolation imposed by the COVID-pandemic over the last twelve months. Twenty One Pilots’ other half, Josh Dun, engineered the drums on the record from across the country, with each song essentially the product of a long distance songwriting process between the two that was dramatically different from anything that they’d done in the past.
With respect to the storyline that their last release, Trench, followed, there is a hint that fans will have something deeper to delve into. Scaled and Icy is an anagram of the phrase “Clancy is Dead”, which their community’s cyber-sleuths have pointed out is a reference to the protagonist of their previous record.
News of their sixth studio album shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to the most dedicated of Twenty One Pilots’ followers, who were treated to two new tracks from the act last year in the form of ‘Level of Concern’ and the festive ‘Christmas Saves The Year’. ‘Level of Concern’ actually picked up a Guinness World Record for the world’s longest music video, with a visual that broadcasted for 177 days straight with a total run time of 4,264 hours, 10 mins, 25 seconds. The song doesn’t find a home on this album but might see a live treatment, with Twenty One Pilots announcing their first-ever live global streaming event, which will take place on the day of the record’s release. You can grab tickets to that here.
