Twenty One Pilots – The Contract

Just sign here, here, and here… and one more here… oh, just one more signature here…

[Video]
[6.82]

Hannah Jocelyn: Twenty One Pilots are something resembling good when they’re goofballs (“Tear In My Heart”) or pop-punk (“Next Semester”), but their angsty lore-drenched cuts are guilty pleasures of mine, especially when they’re this well-produced. “Contract” showcases the good parts of their bad music, with overwrought drumming, cryptic bars, and whiny topline somehow cancelling each other out. There’s something in the intensity that reminds me of PVRIS’ “Heaven”, and makes me miss when that band was good. Let’s be real though: All seven points are for the delay/looping effect on “how’d you know that-that.” 
[7]

Al Varela: If “Overcompensate” was preparing for war, “The Contract” is in the midst of it. A breakbeat races across the track alongside Josh Dunn’s stellar drumming, Tyler Joseph’s voice is unstable and fighting through the anxiety and paranoia that has taken over his mind for years. There’s a lot going on in the song, especially in the production, but that chaos enhances the song for me. It feels almost desperate and flailing for some sort of peace, a contract, if you will. It gives me the impression that this album is in a darker, more bleak place than Clancy was and that the actual “finale” of the Blurryface saga will won’t go out quietly. 
[8]

Will Adams: I love a nervous breakbeat, one that is on the verge of flying off the rails and barely hangs on. It’s a good match for the lyrics, which express anxiety over some foreboding presence keeping Tyler Joseph up at night. I suspect there’s some Twenty One Pilots extended lore being referenced that is above my head, but there’s enough for the casual listener to get the feeling.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I’m a sucker for metal-tinged power chords inspired by a verse that mentions a “necromancer.”
[5]

Ian Mathers: It’s always slightly hard for me to focus on their music, because the editor in me is constantly hissing “it’s a compound number you have to hyphenate it” under its breath. When I can get that under control, “The Contract” is mildly intriguing and, sure, more interesting than a lot of its peers, size-wise. But look at that video! Young folks who latch on to this should immediately be given the last couple of Mew albums, so as steer them away from the path of Sleep Token.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Wait,  Yungblud and Matt Schwartz were involved in this!?? To Yungblud and Matt Schwartz:
[10]

Mark Sinker: Half-listening at first and less then-half-thinking I was processing this as if by Stone Temple Pilots not Twenty One Pilots: reset and switch brain on. But of course that’s a tell, too: I was not feeling this = I was not drawn to intelligent attention! Second half better manages the handling of the not-felt stretches as kind of a bracket for the later heightened scribble, with the sound of the song switching its own brain back on that high bleep-squeak at c.2:37. Or is it back off, who knows?
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: I like the tinny, needling paranoia that is Tyler Joseph’s vocal performance here, the way it cuts through the dense pile-up of bass synths and breakbeats to deliver some rare doses of lyrical clarity and even humor: “that’s crazy, how’d you know that?” This brief turn to conversational naturalism is of course swallowed up by the surrounding mélange of Midwestern Kafkaisms, and the entire thing is weighed down by the ever-present burden of unread Lore. But the band’s desire for digestible angst is too strong to allow them to go full Coheed, and they manage to make their reinvention of Meteora sound pleasantly accidental – nu metal as convergent evolution.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: brb, going to search “linkin park dnb remix” on LimeWire
[8]

Julian Axelrod: Twenty One Pilots never met a genre they couldn’t subsume, so it was only a matter of time before they tried their hand at Swedish emo rap cosplay. Then again, Drain Gang have been siphoning off the boys from Columbus for years, and 21P stole their swag from Linkin Park, so this is just the circle of white boy influence reaching its natural conclusion. Fun drums!
[6]

Jel Bugle: Thrilling but totally safe music, it bubbles along in its over engineered way, a rollercoaster with no loops or hard turns (a monorail). At no point are we ever in any danger.
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