Twenty One Pilots have finally released their highly anticipated cover of My Chemical Romance’s ‘Cancer’. Fans have been waiting for the full version of the cover to drop since Rocksound tweeted a snippet of it earlier this week.
The cover is part of Rocksound’s tribute album to My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade, which also features covers by artists such as Against The Current and State Champs.
The full cover of the song is much longer than the original, and sounds very different as well. As we could tell from the snippet, Twenty One Pilots chose a much softer and toned down sound in terms of production. Tyler’s voice suits the song and its understated tone, while Josh contributes a simple drum line to complete the track. They also change up the structure of the song by repeating certain sections. It almost sounds like a track that would fit in on their most recent album, Blurryface.
Here’s what Tyler had to say about covering ‘Cancer’:
I was really excited about it. But I was also kind of nervous about changing something that felt right and was so simple. The one thing that stood out to me was the lyric ‘I will not kiss you’. It’s such a pure lyric, because that person’s talking about their family members, like their mum and their brothers. When I first heard the song, that was the line that hit me the hardest and stayed with me. So that’s why I was excited to approach the song in a new way. It made me feel that I could highlight one of my favourite lyrics, and then in became kind of a chorus, in a sense. Hopefully we did the song justice…
As for the video itself, it features beautiful and aesthetically pleasing graphics, animation, and text, done by Tantrum Content. The colour scheme is the expected black and white, with pink splashes and accents. One standout section of the video features a hypnotizing animation of books flying from their shelves and swirling around in the air.
Twenty One Pilots’ cover of Cancer, along with the rest of The Black Parade tribute album, is available with the purchase of Rocksound’s October issue, which you can order here. It is also available on iTunes and Apple Music.
Are you a fan of the lyric video for Twenty One Pilots’ cover of ‘Cancer’? Let us know on Twitter @CelebMix.