twenty one pilots have always danced on the edges of genres, emotions, and eras, and with their newest single The Contract, they’re redrawing the boundaries.

Reminiscent of the grit of their self-titled debut and the cinematic vulnerability of Vessel, The Contract is both a love letter to their early days and a bold, adventurous step into the unknown. It’s nostalgic without leaning lazy. It’s self-referential without being self-indulgent. And most excitingly, it sets the stage for Breach – the final chapter in the long-unfolding narrative of Clancy, with a track that perfectly portrays the beginning of the end.

The use of heavy autotune is one of the first things fans will notice; a polarising choice that lands like an intentional call-back to the sonic experimentation of early twenty one pilots. It warps Tyler Joseph’s voice into something mechanical and ghostlike, a glitch in the signal.

As always, Joseph’s songwriting reads like a Rorschach test. Every line is open to interpretation, but the emotional weight is unmistakable. Whether it’s about artistic control, surrender, identity, or all three, The Contract refuses to give easy answers, and that’s what makes it so compelling.

Josh Dun’s drumming remains a grounding force. While the production swirls with synths and sudden sonic shifts, Dun’s percussion is laser-focused, tight, and, at times, downright danceable. His rhythms lead the listener through the chaos with confidence, never overshadowing the track’s quieter, more experimental moments.

And oh, the switch-ups. No twenty one pilots song would be complete without a twist and The Contract is full of them. From stripped-back verses to glitchy build-ups and expansive choruses, it keeps you on edge in the best way. It’s that signature unpredictability that keeps the song from settling into comfort just as the band refuses to settle into familiarity.

In a recent interview with Zane Lowe, Tyler spoke candidly about the creative process:

“As I get older as a creative, the way I describe creating songs is… vomiting on the table and just whatever comes out comes out… as we get older it just feels like there’s less vomit, creative blegh that comes out. But we do feel like we’ve learned how to organise it better.”

It’s a surprisingly accurate description of The Contract; chaotic, cathartic, and carefully constructed. It may not be the most accessible track for casual listeners, but for long-time fans, it’s a thrilling, meta-textual ride through the band’s evolving psyche.

If The Contract is the handshake that seals Breach, then we’re in for one final, unforgettable dive into the world twenty one pilots have built.

The Music Video: Theories and Lore Implications

Directed with a surreal, almost fever-dream quality The Contract is a masterstroke in visual storytelling dense with symbolism, call-backs, and emotional weight. And for fans who have been decoding the story of Clancy, Dema, and the Banditos for years, it’s both haunting and revelatory.

The video opens on a chilling image: red, glowing eyes nodding in unison. Immediately, this evokes the hypnotic lyrics from The Outside (“Up and down they’re nodding, heads are moving up and down, you got it”) – once read as playful, now twisted into something sinister and blindly compliant. But the nodding also harkens all the way back to Glowing Eyes, creating a visual thread through the band’s entire discography. These red-eyed figures seem to represent more than just the seized citizens of Dema. They’re also a mirror held up to us, the audience, the fans, those who have ever found themselves lost in a show, caught in the lights and spectacle and emotion. Perhaps it’s representative of a feeling of anxiety, or pride, for Tyler playing live.

Tyler Joseph himself hinted at this when he tweeted on 22/06/2024:

“The show is a flashback. Like an entire life passing by. Reminding us why we fight right before we do.”

If the final moments of Paladin Strait show Clancy losing consciousness, then the entire Clancy World Tour becomes something else entirely; not a story moving forward, but a moment of reflection, of memory, before the plunge. The music video leans into this concept hard, presenting visuals that feel disjointed, dreamlike, and just a little too vivid to be real. It’s the fuzziness you feel before you’re about to die.

There’s a devastating parallel drawn through colour. Where Jumpsuit once showed Clancy showered in yellow petals – symbols of hope, rebellion, protection – here, we see red petals falling as he stands alone. The petals themselves act as corrupted memories, twisted by Nico’s grip, each one tainting Clancy’s resolve just a little more. But the revolutionary spirit isn’t lost: his sidekick, Torchbearer, appears again, a quiet force urging him to hold on, reminding us that resistance never dies quietly.

At the end of The Contract music video, as Torchbearer’s Theme begins to swell (a haunting instrumental first heard on the Clancy World Tour). Torchbearer would enter during this piece, wordlessly offering Clancy a jacket marked with red tape across the shoulders.

On most nights of the tour, Clancy accepted the jacket. He stepped into the red willingly, with Torchbearer guiding him through the crowd and onto the stage. It was a symbolic surrender, or perhaps a necessary infiltration, as Clancy assumed his role within Dema to fulfil something larger. But then came London Night 2.

Everything changed.

In that moment, Clancy broke the pattern. As Torchbearer stepped out to offer the jacket, Clancy looked straight through him. Like he couldn’t see him at all. He walked right past the figure who had guided him all along, leaving Torchbearer standing alone in the spotlight, reaching out in vain.

It was the first, and only, time the narrative fractured publicly on tour.

And in The Contract music video, we still don’t get that moment resolved. We don’t see Clancy take the jacket. What we do see is Clancy flickering back into consciousness, eyes wide with determination and terror, moments before the screen cuts.

The omission is loud.

Torchbearer, once a symbol of rebellion, becomes an ambiguous figure here. Have they, too, been compromised? Has Clancy learned to see past the illusions? Or is he simply becoming too lost to recognise help when it arrives?

That split-second in London, and the music video’s refusal to resolve it, leaves fans dangling in the most agonizing, delicious way. It reinforces a core theme that runs throughout Breach: the cycle is not easily broken.

With trembling strength and barely enough clarity, Clancy pulls back. It’s a brief, burning moment of clarity in a sea of manipulation. Even under Nico’s influence, under the weight of the cycle and the distortion of memory, Clancy’s will refuses to fade. He breaks the illusion, or maybe just delays the inevitable.

It’s a music video that functions like a hallucination: gorgeously disorienting, full of clues and call-backs, and layered with meaning that will take fans weeks, maybe months, to fully unravel. Like the story of Clancy itself, The Contract doesn’t give us resolution. It gives us a reason to keep going.

And with Breach marking the end of the Clancy saga, this is the moment where the stakes are at their highest and the band, once again, remind us that they’ve never been content to just make music.

They’re building something much bigger.