Coffee Cryptid

What if this whole time the Clancy mask was supposed to be a dog instead of a cat?

What if the mask is supposed to be a symbol to represent death?

Clancy wearing a dog mask could be a way to show that he has given in to this thing he has been so afraid of (death). It's kinda like another version of the skull mask on the skeleton hoodie. He lost to the darker parts of his mind and continued this cycle once again. The figure of Clancy is effectively "dead". It's like Torchbearer said at the end of City Walls, "That's not Clancy up there anymore".

Speaking of T.B. , I think when he gave the mask to Clancy during Navigating it was intended to be symbolic of accepting death as a natural part of living rather than something to be running away from and being afraid of. That would've been an important step in ending the cycle, but Clancy wasn't quite ready for that so now we're starting all over again.

The dog imagery has been staring us in the face the whole Clancy era and throughout Breach. There's the dog leash on Clancy's belt

The shirts Tyler wore during the World Tour

And now the dog/wolf in Drag Path

Then of course there's Heavydirtysoul with its infamous line.

The little snippet of the song that just got posted sounds awesome so far. I'm so excited!!

Apparently a livestream started on the Twenty One Pilots YouTube channel at 12:10 pm EST. Unfortunately I was in the shower so I only caught like the last minute of the stream. From what I heard though, it was Josh setting up his drums for about 20 minutes and then when they were both ready to play the stream ended.

So they're definitely messing with us a bit, but from the looks of it, the title of the stream is some kind of hint about this possible upcoming single.

My first thought was that "08-01" means August 1st, but considering that it's already the 11th, that's not it.

Could the 20-54 be military time? That would translate to 8:54 pm. If that's the case and the song is getting released at that time, why? What's so significant about that time?

Maybe the "8-01_2" is supposed to mean August 12th? I guess it could make sense. Breach is supposed to come out on September 12th and The Contract came out on June 12th, so this next single dropping tomorrow would fit in with that.

Of course it reminded a lot of us of Trash the dragon from Scaled and Icy. That makes me wonder if we'll actually get to see them again. Unfortunately I don't feel that it's likely, but it would be really cool.

Based on the lyrics we got so far, "Would you move closer?", it sounds like this is another one that could have something to do with Josh. It reminds me of when Josh moved to LA. Maybe this song is Tyler expressing some of his feelings about Josh not living close to him anymore and dealing with the complications of long-distance friendship. If this is the case, it'll definitely hit very close to home for me. (⁠╥⁠﹏⁠╥⁠)

The lyrics we received for Drum Show are, "I've been this way. I wanted to change". Like with the other songs, I've been reminded of lyrics from other TØP albums. In this case it made me think of the line from Snap Back, "I have seemed to run out of excuses of why I am this way".

Honestly, as excited as I am for Drum Show, I don't have a whole lot of theories yet for it. My best guess for now is just that Josh or Torchbearer will be important to this song. Fingers crossed that we'll get his vocals on this one. 🤞

Why is it written this way? Well, I've seen several people point out that RAWFEAR is an anagram for WARFARE. The title being capitalized could've been an indication that there was something about it that was significant and that we needed to decipher it. Warfare would definitely make sense with the lore, especially since the Banditos are actively at war with Dema and Tyler has always had a war going on in his own mind.

Another possibility I just considered is that this song could have something to do with Blurryface. Consistently when Tyler posts, his style is to have all his words in lowercase. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Blurryface, who posts in all caps. I'm not totally confident that this is why there's capitalization, but it's just a thought I'm throwing out there.

The title being all one word immediately reminded me of Heavydirtysoul. That's our most clear example of a TØP song being written like this. I think it's very possible that these two songs will relate to each other somehow. Consider the line "Death inspires me like a dog inspires a rabbit". I'd say that's a pretty good example of a situation where you would feel raw fear.

Now let's take a look at the lyrics snippet we got for RAWFEAR.

"Learning all that really matters is a slow and painful lesson."

This is very reminiscent of the Oldies Station lyrics, "Only consistency in your periphery is fear and the bridge of your nose, and as you move about, you learn to tune them out..." and "You've had your turns with relative pain...In a season of lessons learned in giving up you learn what you can and can't take."

This definitely concerns me a bit because it seems almost certainly that he's talking about Torchbearer here. I could imagine this being Clancy's mindset after or during the jacket incident. It sounds like if he had been able to see him, maybe he would've done something different. As I wrote this I was reminded of these lyrics from Bandito, "Either way it helps to hear these words bounce off of you. The softest echo could be enough for me to make it through." .

I'm also a little curious about the changing of tense with the two sentences though. We have "I wonder" and "I wanted" , one of which is in the present tense and the other in a past tense. So what we can gather here is that Clancy is still holding onto some hope that Torch is real because he's still actively wondering where he is. His hope is beginning to fade though with the next line as he says he wanted Torch to show him, the implication being that it's a little too late for that now.

Another interesting thing with the City Walls lyrics is how reminiscent they are of a certain part in Polarize. In that song we have the lyrics, "I don't know where you are. You'll have to come and find me, find me.". I find it so cool how we're harkening back to previous songs because it really reinforces the fact that this story is a cycle.

I think it's very possible that we'll get references to other songs with the rest of the tracklist. My theory so far is that almost all of the new songs will have some tie to a song from Blurryface, whether it's lyrically or with the beats.

With the tracklist release, the song teasers, and the official album release date being announced, I felt now was the perfect time to come back here. First things first, I'll share the email I received from Twenty One Pilots earlier today:

The thing that's drawing the most attention in this list so far is "RAWFEAR". It's the only title here that's stylized with all caps. Another interesting thing about it is that rather than the two words having a space between them like all the others, the title is all one word.

I won't get into theories about that yet. My plan is to make a post for each of the songs on this list so I can take time to analyze each of them properly. Whenever I make my way down the list to The Contract I'll actually talk about everything in the video that I noticed and pick apart some of the lyrics. Starting tomorrow I'll get to work on my tracklist posts!

Oh, I also want to share with y'all the Trench-themed cake I made for my 21st birthday. It wasn't perfect but I'm still pretty proud of how it turned out

Some fans got texts from the band by the same number as "An Evening with Twenty One Pilots". Unfortunately I didn't receive a message, but from what people were saying, it was a link to a YouTube video on the band account. In the video's description we saw this:

This is more likely than not about Torchbearer, our resident "hallucination". We know he's actually real, but since Clancy can't see him anymore, he thinks Torchbearer was just something his mind made up and that he has been in this alone the whole time.

The day after we received a new video on the band account (in the style of the usual Blurryface videos we've been getting). It was deleted incredibly quickly, but some people were able to screen record. This time the voice said something like "but now I plead, just take the deal. I promise you".

I've seen people speculate that this line is from Torchbearer's POV, which makes a lot of sense. It definitely doesn't sound like the same POV from the previous videos. So what it seems like to me is that The Contract is gonna have at least 2 POVs and that it'll be Clancy and Torchbearer having a conversation with each other. Well, I'm not entirely sure if they'll be talking to each other exactly. It sounds like TB is talking to him but Clancy is just talking out loud about what he's experiencing. My hope is that my theory of Josh singing on this album will come true and we'll get to see that here.

Now for today's news. We got a tweet from the band account where the original caption was "THURSDAY" but was changed to "thursday |-/". It was the usual countdown with it now being at 3 days. Unlike all the previous videos, we heard one of the lyrics being sung by Tyler: "...and I'm just trying to stay quiet".

Something interesting though is that the version of the video posted on YouTube has Josh in the beginning as well as Tyler. I thought I had been thinking of the wrong video at first or just imagining it because none of the other versions had Josh, but he is there. I'm curious why the YouTube version specifically has him in it but the others don't.

As I was writing this post, a tweet from Blurryface came in, posting another video. We hear some sort of lyrics at the start but it's not very easy to make them out. What I heard was "...feeling numb". There was then some sped up instrumentals, definitely from The Contract. It ended with the same vocals of Tyler singing as the video from the band account. It's very possible that the lyrics at the beginning were a combo of the lyrics we've gotten before, just all sped up. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.

The closer we're getting to the release date of The Contract, the crazier things are getting. I've just seen reports that the Blurryface account has been DMing people on Twitter with a new video. This is unprecedented behavior.

Sources have been uploading the video for others to view. I've reviewed the footage and from what I could tell, it sounded like the voice said "I want to get out there, but I don't try". This seems to be in reference to the previous videos where the voice mentioned hiding in his house from the necromancer outside.

All we can see in the video is Clancy from the waist down with someone (most plausibly Josh) sitting at his drum set.

In additional news, we got a post from the band account showing us a timer going from 10 to 9 followed by "9 DAYS UNTIL THE CON-TRACT" and some blurred footage.

Though the hyphen is most likely due to the spacing of the text, it did raise a question for our investigative team. Could this hyphen be an intentional decision to create the separate words "con" and "tract"?

Let's look at the definitions of these words.

First up we have "con", which as most of us know, is a word for deceiving/persuading someone of something untrue.

This could have to do with Blurryface lying to Clancy about an agreement/the contract they have with each other.

Then there's "tract". The definition we'll be looking at for this is the one pictured above. By now we're all aware of the religious imagery within the lore, so "tract" having some religious context to it immediately caught the attention of our investigators.

Perhaps in the new song Blurry will be showing up at Clancy's door to give him some sort of pamphlet full of misinformation about the Dema organization in order to convince him to join them.