My spouse and I drove home for the holidays, and it’s a nine-hour drive, so we needed a listening project to get us through the journey. Fortunately, we had been planning this for weeks, and we already had something lined up. We had recently watched the new season of Arcane, which features a (great) song from Twenty One Pilots, so it quickly became inevitable that we would be going through their entire discography on our road trip.
I had plenty of thoughts about all the albums, of course. Both Heidi and I had been listening to the band on and off since at least their second album, and we were surprised by which songs we remembered well or didn’t. But at some point during Trench, I remembered something else important: I hadn’t just heard this album before, I had written a review of it.
In October of 2018, during my freshman year of college, I wrote this review of Trench for Calvin Chimes, where I also discuss the band’s previous albums. It’s been more than six years since then, and the review is a fascinating window into what I was like at the time, both as a writer and as a music listener. This was a time before “I Was Wrong About Taylor Swift,” and you can kinda tell. Overall, the review is decent enough, and it has some reasonable takes, like this:
The first two tracks on the album are energetic, thick-textured songs with just enough variety in form to stay interesting without losing momentum and with lyrical density that allows lead vocalist Tyler Joseph to show off his ever-improving flow.
These tracks are followed by a couple of medium-paced songs which serve as contrast to the previous two in both mood and genre, substituting a hip-hop style element for a more alternative rock/pop one. Joseph also displays his stylistic vocal range for the first time on these tracks, showing with simple melodies that he can sound good in his middle range as well as his falsetto.
I agree with all of that! And I like the sentences I wrote. But the review also includes passages like this one:
The last few albums toyed with a number of differing sounds, to mixed success. The sort of edgy, alternative hip-hop style that features in songs like “Fall Away,” “Car Radio” and “Ride” seem to be the band’s most comfortable sound. These songs have a healthy mix of tight percussion, synthesized audio effects and well-produced vocals which combine with creative song structures to make the sound that is both the most cohesive and the most characteristic of Twenty One Pilots as a band.
I absolutely, categorically disagree with my past self here. The style range included in the music of Twenty One Pilots is all characteristic of them as a band, because it’s the music they made, and it’s obvious to me now that I was just playing favorites, projecting some kind of weird competence argument onto the music as a result. Just because I personally didn’t like “House of Gold” doesn’t mean it isn’t “characteristic” of their sound.
I also wrote this, later in the review:
Overall, the music of Twenty One Pilots is a much more accessible entry for young music enthusiasts into some of these deeper themes (mental health, struggles with faith, etc.) than a lot of the current mainstream hip-hop, and it explores melodic and harmonic options in ways that very few other hip-hop artists do today.
What am I talking about? Where do I get off making assertions like that about the entire genre of hip-hop as compared to this one band? I’m not nearly knowledgeable enough to make a claim like that today, and I most certainly wasn’t in 2018.
The review as a whole is mixed between complimentary and critical, but it also has this undertone of haughty bitterness, which I think comes from a desire to appear “above” the music, or at the very least communicate a level of expertise about it. It’s not as though I’m the first person to do this in a review, but looking back I think it actually detracts from my credibility. I come across as sort of unappeasable; obviously inexperienced, yet eager to broadcast my elite taste in music. I wish I could go back and tell myself to chill, just a little bit. And maybe to focus my thesis in the review a little better.
I’d like to think that in the past six years I’ve developed as a writer, but I’ll let you be the judge of that, if you like. What I can say with confidence, though, is that I’ve gotten much better at enjoying things. Complaining and criticizing can be fun, of course, but…enjoying things is a little easier on the soul, and I’ve learned that from trying plenty of both. Nowadays, you’ll never catch me writing a review of something I absolutely hated. Well, no promises. But it’s not likely. I’d much rather focus on something I really liked, and on the parts of it that I liked the best. I’ve already been doing as much on this very site.
I never actually hated Twenty One Pilots, I don’t think. But I was definitely holding myself back from enjoying it more, and that’s evident in my old review. This time around, I enjoyed the entire experience of listening to their discography, even if I did have favorites.
Incidentally, as of our listening marathon, I still personally hold that the later albums fall more in line with what I prefer musically, especially including the last two since Trench, both of which are no-skip albums for me. But my updated, 2025 take on Twenty One Pilots as a band comes summed up well in a direct quote from Heidi: “I think they’ve been good the whole time?”

Philip Rienstra (‘21) majored in writing and music and has plans to pursue a career in publishing. They are a recovering music snob, a fruit juice enthusiast, and a big fan of the enneagram. They’re currently living in St. Paul with their spouse, Heidi.
I love to see people mature in their enjoyment of music. It’s a long journey I’ve had over the last 30 years from being an angry 15 year old who hated anything that wasn’t “alternative,” to being 48 and seeing the walls of genre be gleefully torn down. Love the article. It’s my first one of yours, but I’ll definitely read more.
it’s a beautiful thing to see personal accountability and people publicly addressing their prior actions. most of the negative reviews towards them i’ve seen do hold a sort of grudge, almost jealousy behind it; this updated review shows growth over time and realization. i too was once stuck in the hater mindset, and it’s one of the hardest things to break, so i commend you. this was a lovely read, although my first of yours, surely not the last.