Weekend Diversion: ‘Heavydirtysoul’

I stumble across a lot of pop music by accident, and these days it’s also mostly through New Zealand's free-to-air video music channel. Last week I shared one song I discovered by accident, and this week I thought I’d share another.

The video above is “Heavydirtysoul”, a song by 21 Pilots from their fourth album, Blurryface. The group is summarised by Wikipedia:

Twenty One Pilots (stylized as TWENTY ØNE PILØTS) is an American musical duo originating from Columbus, Ohio. The band was formed in 2009 by lead vocalist Tyler Joseph along with former members Nick Thomas and Chris Salih, who eventually left in 2011, and currently consists of Joseph and drummer Josh Dun. [Bolding is in the original]

21 Pilots played in Wellington and Auckland last month, and were very well received. They also said nice things about New Zealand on TVNZ’s Seven Sharp, something Kiwi journalists love rather a lot. The album Blurryface peaked at number 7 in Australia, number 2 in New Zealand, and number 1 in the USA. “Heavydirtysoul”, however, wasn’t a mainstream hit in any of those countries.

While I really liked the sound of the song, it was the video that caught my attention. It’s fascinating (the video below is a “behind the scenes” look at the making of the video). I saw it a week or two before they came to New Zealand, and until I saw that video I'd never heard of them.

One thing that I didn’t know at the time, or until quite awhile later, is that both Joseph and Dun are Christians, and their music is positively swooned over by Catholic bloggers (like this one from New Zealand, or a rather over-the-top one from three years ago). I dunno, maybe those Catholics are right, but I think they could be trying to read too much into the band and their songs. At any rate, these guys are like most young people: They’re not trying to force their religion on anybody—which is obvious because they’re not the ones bringing it up.

At any rate, I liked this song and this video, and it’s just another one that I found completely by accident because I happened to tune into the free-to-air video music channel at just the right time. I’m sure it won’t be the last time this happens.