Twenty One Pilots Hint at Next Era in Cryptic ‘I Am Clancy’ Video Recap: ‘A New Chapter Begins’

Twenty One Pilots fans woke up to some thrilling news on Thursday morning (Feb. 22), when the band dropped a four-minute Easter egg-packed video teasing the next, and perhaps final, chapter in the story that began with their breakthrough 2015 album Blurryface.

“Next week, a new chapter begins,” read the caption to the “I Am Clancy” visual that served as a recap for the entire Blurry saga.

“I am trapped,” singer Tyler Joseph says in voiceover over footage from videos that have helped tell the twisted, futureshock tale of the allegorical walled city Dema, the Banditos and the nine iron-fisted bishops that won’t allow the residents to escape. “Stuck in a cycle I’ve never been able to break. I want to believe this is the last time, I don’t know for sure. I’ll start with what I do know.”

Joseph then goes on to relate the story of an escapee from the “circular cement city” of Dema, who has seen some of the expansive surrounding wild, green continent Trench, but who keeps getting caught by the red-robed wraith known as Nico, aka Blurryface. The rest of the twisted tale touches on the nine bishops’ “miraculous power and hijacked religion” as the source of their authority, based on theory of self-destruction as the only path to paradise.

The lore then gets even knottier, touching on the bishops’ use of a power called “seizing,” which allows them to take control of dead bodies for short periods. It is a power only they have… well, except for the narrator, the escapee, who is an exception to the rule and also has the power. After tricking Nico into taking him outside the walls and escaping once again, he was caught and returned, but not before getting a glimpse of the mythical Banditos outlaws, characters introduced in videos for “Jumpsuit” and “Nico and the Niners” from Trench.

The recitation then turns to 2021’s Scaled and Icy album, whose more mainstream, pop-oriented material is described as the Bishops’ attempt to make the hero more palatable and entertaining, as seen in videos for the singles “Shy Away,” “Choker” and “Saturday.” Long story short, Nico was betrayed, the narrator escaped again and wound up in a new place, the island Voldsoy, where he was given the gift of the same powers the Bishops wield. “I am returning to Trench… I am Clancy,” he says at the end.

It’s a lot, as evidence by one comment on the video, which read, “I’ve been trying to understand this lore for 6 years and you guys really just explained it all in 4 minutes.”

In a 2019 interview with NME, Joseph hinted that the follow-up to 2018’s Trench album — the pop-leaning Scaled and Icy, which had not yet been announced at the time — would continue the sci-fi-like rebel saga. “There’s definitely an end-game. There’s a story. I think I was very specific that there’s a reason why the record ends with [the song] ‘Leave The City’ and the song itself is a kind of cliff-hanger,” he said at the time. “I mean, the whole thing was it’s setting up for what’s next and it’d be silly to not at least resolve what we’ve already started.”

It wouldn’t be 21P without some additional, puzzling clues, which reportedly include the unexplained addition of red strips of tape to the covers of the band’s albums on streaming services, as well as letters sent out to fans from the “Sacred Municipality of Dema” featuring maps, urls and pages labeled “EVIDENCE” and puzzling billboards around the world with the band’s logo.

At press time no additional information was available on the band’s next move.

Check out the “I Am Clancy” video below.

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