Music

Twenty One Pilots officially announced the Clancy era on Thursday (Feb. 29). The quadrennial quirk of the calendar was the perfect time to reveal that the final chapter in the Blurryface saga will unfold when the Columbus, Ohio duo’s seventh album drops on May 17.

Before releasing the video for first single “Overcompensate,” singer/guitarist Tyler Joseph and drummer Josh Dun shared the album’s fiery artwork earlier in the day, in which the pair stand amid a field of licking flames, with the title situated vertically over Joseph’s balaclava-obscured face.

The “Overcompensate” visual opens with a hovering shot of an ocean before a glitchy woman’s voice and insistent keyboard thrum bubble up over a map of the fictional land of Trench. The drone-like shot then flies above a barren-looking island before dropping into Dema as an ominous voice croaks, “welcome back to Trench.”

The scene switches to an empty arena bathed in blood-red light, with Dun in the middle of the floor playing the song’s thundering beat as a masked Joseph materializes to sing to a room full of grim-faced young people in grey sweatsuits. With the beat slowing down, Joseph breaks into his familiar rap cadence, “Earned my stripes/ Three hundreds tracks in my Adidas jacket/ Bless your ear holes while you react/ Acting gobsmacked don’t hesitate to maybe overcompensate/ I feel like I was just here/ Same twitching in my eyes,” before singing the melodic chorus, “I fly by the dangerous bend symbol/ Don’t hesitate to maybe overcompensate/ And then by the time I catch in my peripheral/ Don’t hesitate to maybe overcompensate.”

Climbing to a high point in a pulpit-like spot — not unlike the platform Joseph often scrambles onto during the band’s arena shows — the singer then reveals “I am Clancy,” pulling open his jacket to reveal suspenders with rune-like letters running down them horizontally. Near the end of the clip, the audience shuffles out and Dun and Tyler move to the front of a classroom while a series of mysterious symbols, maps and legends are projected onto their faces. It ends, of course, with yet another unexplained image: a glowing-eyed Clancy dressed all in black holding up a pair of animal horns before slyly smiling at the camera.

Because 21P’s knotty world building is jammed with more Easter eggs than a Taylor Swift concert, eagle-eyed fans noted that the Clancy release date is exactly nine years to the day after the 2015 drop of the first album in the sprawling Blurryface saga. Last week the band began the roll-out of the new album’s story via the four-minute video “I Am Clancy” recap video, which served as a catch-up on the story of the allegorical walled city of Dema, the rebel Banditos outlaw group and the story’s villain, the red-robed Nice, aka Blurryface.

The upcoming album is posited as the final entry in the long-running story that began on the group’s 2015 breakthrough Blurryface album, and then continued on 2018’s Trench and 2021’s Scaled and Icy. The news was accompanied by what appears to be the color theme of the Clancy album, red tape, which was spotted over the digital covers of the band’s albums on streaming services. The Blurryface story kicked off with a red and black color scheme before pivoting to yellow for Trench.

Check out the Clancy album cover and “Overcompensate” video below.