The Daily Spin, October 18
Twenty One Pilots | Scaled And Icy
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Scaled And Icy (2021)
Artist: Twenty One Pilots
Link:
I’ve got to give Twenty One Pilots credit - it would have been extremely easy to rest on the laurels they more than earned with 2015’s Blurryface, the same way that they could have seen the mixed reception that Trench and single Heathens received critically and chosen to give pause there - but instead, they plunged headfirst into their next adventure, and it seems to have paid off pretty well with Scaled And Icy.
It’s both a blessing and a curse that Twenty One Pilots haven’t really progressed their sound - because when it hits, it’s really good, and the minor evolutions they have made, adding little synth influences to their brand of poppier rock keep a lot of their songs from sliding too far off-kilter. Their lyrics are a bit of a miss for me - the rap is often outright just kinda hard to listen to, feeling uncomfortably like long-lost videos sent over Skype in middle school of attempted raps (they don’t exist anymore, and I have made sure of this).
It was this that originally drove me away from the group - that underlying cringiness that’s really hard to escape sometimes, but an album like this reminds me that hey, there’s something there if you can look past it.
Rating: 7.7/10
Best Tracks: The Outside
Worst Tracks: Mulberry Street