3 on the Billboard 200 album chart this week - got a coming-out party during a kaleidoscopic, ambitious day-of-release livestream that had the band performing most of the tracks on custom sets built in their hometown arena.
“Or I could make a right-hand turn and kind of escape from that feeling.” “When I first started writing in 2020 I could go one of two ways: I could make a left-hand turn here and really lean into what I felt like everyone was feeling, this ominous world is ending feel,” Joseph tells Billboard about his creative fork in the road moment during COVID lockdown. Coming out of the global pandemic lockdown, Joseph and drummer Josh Dun U-turned from the dense, frenetic concept album’s twisty storyline and jittery emotions to a breezy, 37-minute buzzbomb of tracks such as “Good Day,” “Mulberry Street,” “Saturday” and “Bounce Man.”Īnd, rather than taking what Joseph jokingly referred to as a planned “victory lap” of arenas and festivals to close out the Trench cycle, the hard-touring duo suddenly found themselves with an abundance of empty calendar pages for the first time in a decade. For a band whose music has often delved into the struggles of navigating life with an anxious, worried mind, S&I is, indeed, a buzz and a light.