The only bigger artists in 2016 were Drake, Beyoncé and Adele, according to Nielsen Music. The track - known for its sing-songy chorus where Joseph longs for childhood comforts - has over 1.5 billion YouTube plays. The group’s 2015 breakout album, “Blurryface,” featuring the anxiety anthem “Stressed Out,” went triple platinum. Twenty One Pilots are unconventional - their songs stretch into rap, reggae, prog, electro-pop and screamo, often in the same track. The thing about rock bands in 2018 is they don’t do well commercially. “Then it started to translate regionally. “We were trying to raise up out of the local scene,” he said. Joseph said the duo wasn’t dreaming big then. (The band signed to Fueled by Ramen, the then-Atlantic Records Group label known for releasing emo and pop-punk bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco.) “But you go over city limits, and nobody knew who they were.” “In Columbus they were the Beatles,” said Pete Ganbarg, the president of A&R for Atlantic Records.
So did representatives from 12 record labels.
Then they played a concert in 2011 where 1,700 fans showed up. Eventually, they’d announce a big hometown show, go all-out - lights, grander stunts, fresh set lists - and tell everyone to be there. The thinking, the group’s 29-year-old singer and songwriter Tyler Joseph said, was that other groups were practically begging: “It was just a bombardment of ‘come see us play.’” So Joseph and the drummer Josh Dun played tiny, unpromoted gigs on any nearby bill they could join, leaving strong impressions with their theatrical antics and genre-agnostic songs. COLUMBUS, OHIO - The word “unlikely” pops up so often when discussing the duo Twenty One Pilots, it should come as no surprise that the band’s early strategy for building itself into a local touring machine was not inviting fans to 99 percent of its shows.