On 25 October 2018, critically acclaimed musical duo twenty one pilots released their fifth full length studio album after a lot of cryptic teasing, ‘Trench’. The album was praised and seemed to be a new, more interesting instrumental direction for the group. The crunching choruses and sweet pop hooks had been replaced with murky, swampy pianos and synths, and lyrically, the album was abstract, ambiguous, and raised a lot of questions that fans were left to decode. During this essay, I’m going to throw my hat into the ring and give you my take in terms of decoding the narrative through line of ‘Trench’.
An appropriate place to start would be the cryptic website the band put up full of images and, most notably, journal entries signed by the mysterious figure, Clancy. During the first part of this essay, I’m going to be critically analysing these journal entries. The first entry sets the stage perfectly. It establishes that when he was younger, Clancy was enticed by Dema (the dystopian city that represents mental illness across the album): ‘As a child, I looked upon Dema with wonder’. Genius. Children are, after all, largely oblivious to the idea of mental illness as a whole, so framing Clancy as not being at all suspicious when he first sets foot in Dema makes perfect logical sense. Clancy expands, noting that he had a ‘deep affection for Dema’ when he was younger. This reinforces my previous point, but you could easily see this young Clancy as a teenage Tyler Joseph who perhaps fell into the trap of thinking mental illness should be glorified. There is further evidence for this theory as the track ‘Neon Gravestones’ directly deals with this issue. Tyler sings: ‘In my opinion our culture can treat a loss like it’s a win / and right before we turn on them, we give them the highest of praise / and hang their banner from a ceiling / communicating, further engraving / an earlier grave is an optional way / no’. This song is framed as a message to society, but it could also be interpreted as Clancy desperately trying to talk some sense into a young Tyler who is still not entirely sure what mental illness is and what he is going through.
Clancy also proceeds to talk about Keons (the bishop associated with the song ‘Heavydirtysoul’ from ‘Blurryface’) is a bishop that he is ‘proud to serve’. There are very limited connections you can make between this detail and the text of the album, but it is still fascinating to note.
The second entry does not quite provide us with the same level of detailed insight as the first, but it is interesting to note that Clancy has never considered Dema a home, but merely a place where he exists. If that doesn't some up mental illness, I don’t know what will. Lacking a feeling of belonging and consequently feeling everything you do holds no value in the great scheme of things. That concept undoubtedly makes up an essential chunk of the thematic arc of the album.
It is also interesting the way the entry ends: ‘This hope of discovery alone has birthed a new vision of myself; a better version, I hope, that I will find a way to experience what’s beyond these colossal walls’. It is things like this that has led many people to believe that Clancy is the opposite of Blurryface, the titular title character from the bands previous album that represents all of Tyler Joseph’s insecurities and the irrational side of his brain. Clancy is instead thought to represent the hopeful, rational side of Tyler’s mind.
The third entry offers a slight expansion to the universe too. Clancy writes ‘But what I call a sentence, other accept as normalcy. How do they so efficiently eradicate the dream within us?’ This is an unsettling detail. It must only make Clancy feel even more alone knowing that those who live among him have accepted mental illness as a part of life and do not have the motivation to fight it off that Clancy has. Obviously, we find out later on the album that the Banditos exist, a group of people trying to help people escape Dema who Tyler even acknowledges on ‘My Blood’, and on ‘Leave The City’ he sings the climactic line ‘In trench I’m not alone’. So clearly there are motivated people in Dema with him. This of course assumes that Tyler and Clancy are the same thing, and the general consensus does seem to suggest they are different entities as I discussed earlier. Either way, it’s an odd, unsettling, borderline uncanny detail.
Journal entry four is a bit of a contradictory mess. Clancy has been framed as this lonely figure who does not share his dream of leaving Dema with anyone. So why all of a sudden do we have the plural pronoun ‘we’ turning up and suggesting he’s not alone in his quest. Two possible explanations: either the ‘we’ is referring to both Tyler and Clancy, or, the more likely one, ‘we’ is referring to Clancy and the Banditos, but there’s no direct reference to them at any stage in the text of the journal entries up to this point, making this explanation sound both plausible and unlikely. You could make the argument that Clancy’s relationship with the Banditos is established in the trilogy of music videos released to accompany the journal entries, but we’ve already established that the general consensus is that Tyler (who we see in the music videos) and Clancy (who the journal entries are signed by) are different entities; there is no clear answer. You see why trying to come up with a timeline that pieces together all these events is so challenging. Twenty one pilots certainly don’t like making it easy for anyone. The rest of the entry details Clancy’s plan.
Clancy is revealed to have escaped Dema in the next entry. It is truly fascinating the way that he goes about describing how he feels having escaped: ‘I feel weightless. I knew that place had always held me down, but for the first time, I can feel the levity I had hoped for’. This quote from the fifth entry makes it pretty explicit that there is some link between these events and the song ‘Levitate’ from the album, a song that sets the stage about what goes on in Dema and links it to what goes on in popular culture as a whole. We will discuss this link in greater detail when we come to discussing ‘Levitate’ in our track by track analysis.
Clancy may have escaped, but the terror of Dema remains: ‘I can see it back in the distance, and I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t constantly on my mind...I feel betrayed by what I assumed was my home – if I ever end up back there, I want to be able to look at it in the same way’. Haunting when you take on board what happens next. We’ll get to it.
The rest of the entry reflects of the wonder of having escaped Dema and entered Trench, the long road back to civilisation. Clancy describes it as ‘vast’, ‘endless’, and, most oddly of all, ‘open. Not precisely what you and I would associate with a trench. Perhaps this is used to further emphasize how controlling the bishops of Dema were that something as deep and lonely as a trench can make Clancy feel so free. But what might be most chilling is the line ‘I wonder who else is out here’. This is truly chilling as it is a key concept that makes up the climactic moment on the album’s closing track ‘Leave The City’ where Tyler sings in the song’s dying moments ‘And though I’m far from home / In Trench I’m not alone’. More on this in a bit.
The final entry is perhaps most well-known for the being a bit of a big reveal. Up to this point, people who were studying these entries at the time of them being released had assumed that Tyler and Clancy were the same person. This changed everything. Clancy talks about finding someone else (probably Tyler) travelling through Trench, and watching a bishop (probably Nico) possess them. The details are few and pretty abstract, but the bishop is described as possessing Tyler by doing something with his hands: ‘outstretched hands smeared his neck’. This is exactly what we see happen to Tyler in the music videos. The penny drops, Clancy is not Tyler Joseph.
By no means the only interesting bit of this entry though. Clancy, shaken by what he has seen, runs away quickly as he confronts the idea that he might not be alone in Trench. He then questions why he even left Dema in the first place, describes Trench as ‘endless and hopeless’, and then says this: ‘At least Dema is a place that I know, and at times like this, I miss a lot about what I know. This will be much tougher than I imagined. Nothing out here is familiar. I've witnessed the presence of others for the first time today, and I feel more alone than ever. Cover me’. Make no mistake, this is powerful stuff. Clancy, after nine years and faced with an opportunity to escape Dema for good, is second guessing himself in the vast emptiness of Trench, ending it with the final use of the recurring phrase ‘cover me’. Sound familiar? It should. Part II where we will discuss the music video trilogy is coming.
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