twenty one pilots

The debut from Ohio’s twenty one pilots is a genre-melding album that nods to their theatrical leanings (Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons inspired their name). Splashy, defiant songs fuse piano-bar pop sensibilities with 21st-century beats and grand exhibitions of emotion, as in the soaring chorus of the Bowie-echoing “Air Catcher” and the doo-wop-backed bravado of “Friend, Please.” Tyler Joseph’s knotty depictions of millennial angst on tracks like the ruminative “Taxi Cab” and the gritty “Isle of Flightless Birds” are forthright and poetic.