HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Vessel – Twenty One Pilots

January 21, 2023 Megan Jenkins

Imagine: the year is 2013 and you’re sitting in your bedroom that’s adorned with FALL OUT BOY posters. You’ve just put on your knock-off “normal people scare me” shirt after filming a Harlem Shake Vine, ready to upload. One of your friends has just shared a viral Facebook video of a man with a ukulele singing a cover of ELVIS PRESLEY’s Can’t Help Falling In Love and you decide to click on the profile. It’s a band that’s new to your radar called TWENTY ONE PILOTS, and they’ve just released their third album Vessel.

In a year when so many bands released incredibly influential albums, it was hard for newer bands to keep up and be seen. Why would you want to bother when you were fighting against the likes of PARAMORE’s self-titled album, BRING ME THE HORIZON’s Sempiternal, and ARCTIC MONKEYS’ AM? These bands didn’t have what Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun did; they had a new lease of life given to them by a new signing to Fueled By Ramen and were ready to revitalise a scene that had seen so much controversy at late. Shortly after signing they released the Three Songs EP, a collection of the tracks Guns For Hands, Migraine, and Ode To Sleep – the first taste of this new iteration of a band many had already come to love, before releasing Vessel less than a month later.

Though TWENTY ONE PILOTS were new to the mainstream, the songs from Vessel were anything but. Six tracks in total were taken from their previous album Regional At Best (2011) and re-recorded for Vessel, resulting in the former being pulled from all distribution sites. These songs included the opening track Ode To Sleep. It’s a track that manages to combine elements of synthpop, rap and spoken word, classic pop, and hip-hop in the space of a short four and a half minutes, yet somehow perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the album; mixing genres and styles together seamlessly without clashing. Joseph had recorded the entirety of Regional At Best “not knowing whether or not people were going to hear it” and viewed Vessel as a much-needed opportunity to complete these songs.

Arguably the most well-known song on Vessel is the now infamous Car Radio. Its premise is simple and inspired by an event that happened to Joseph during college. He arrived late to class one day and forgot to lock his car door. On his return, he discovered someone had broken into his car and stolen everything inside, including his radio and CDs. Like most other college students, Joseph didn’t have the funds to be able to replace what he had lost, and the subsequent experience of driving without his car radio make him realise that “music can act as a distraction and can get in the way of where your mind wants to go.” This sentiment spoke to so many people, mainly those in their teens, and helped to transform Vessel into what many felt was a groundbreaking discovery for themselves and their music taste. It was a gateway into the alternative genre for so many and gave a whole new generation that had been scared to be themselves an excuse to be real and individual, and a new way into the emo scene.

Though it may have garnered some negative reviews upon its release, with Rolling Stone hailing it as “obnoxious”, “disagreeable” and “aggravating”, this album was revolutionary for so many, and these negative reviews become redundant when you take a step back and realise the impact it had on so many. With this release, TWENTY ONE PILOTS redefined what it meant to be a rock band, not falling into the usual stereotypes that were synonymous with 2013 and the alternative scene. They write about those everyday troubles that so many of us face, engaging fans with lyrics about depression and anxiety. They may be common issues but those with them are able to feel that they aren’t alone when listening to them, and finally can belong somewhere. While to many a vessel is simply a boat, to TWENTY ONE PILOTS and their dedicated fanbase, it is an object carrying something far more important than the outer shell.

Vessel is so much more important than its surface appearance, carrying precious cargo within.