Almost two weeks ago, dynamic duo Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun from Twenty One Pilots released their newest album “Trench.”

The album is their fifth studio album following “Blurryface”, which was released in 2015, keeping up with the band’s tradition to release a new album every three years.

Unlike “Blurryface,” “Trench” has less of a mainstream sound and focuses more on an inner world instead of a character that lead singer and songwriter Tyler Joseph has made up.

This imaginative world is called Dema and features a character named Clancy who is attempting to escape this world. Over the summer, journals from the Clancy character were released weeks prior to the first single, “Jumpsuit.”

Joseph has kept with the idea of following a character around and lyrically personifying someone as he did with Blurryface. We can conclude that he has left the world by the end of the album with the song “Leave the City”, which is similar to how Joseph let go of the Blurryface character in the last song “Goner.”

Lyrically this song takes on a lot of serious topics such as depression, anxiety, suicide and stigmas, which is similar to the way Twenty One Pilots’ first two albums “Regional at Best” and “Twenty One Pilots” were written.

In the song “Neon Gravestones,” Joseph talks about the glorification of celebrity suicides in the media and ending the stigma surrounding mental illness instead of increasing it. He talks about how if he loses a war with himself, he wants people to move on and not glorify him.

This is similar to “Regional at Best” when Joseph talks a lot about his own personal fight with mental illness and how he tries to beat it.

I think this shift from mainstream back to their roots was a very smart move because many fans felt the band was becoming conditioned to what society wanted from music artists and “Blurryface” was not as deep as “Vessel” or the other two albums.

Twenty One Pilots is known for their deep, thought-provoking lyrics over an upbeat tempo and this album has definitely benefited from that. Joseph has returned to more of the slam poetry feel that fans loved from the older albums.

Lyrically and musically this album makes you think about society, mental health and taboo topics that are still heavily stigmatized in our society.

This album is something we needed to hear, and leave it to Twenty One Pilots to tell the harsh truth that we all needed to hear.