It’s almost been a year since we heard from Twenty One Pilots. The band’s last ‘Sleepers’ video dropped on July 5, and since then we’ve had radio silence.
But this is a band who never fail to spark conspiracy, whether it’s in the form of cryptic Twitter accounts or, as we discovered last night, strange URLs found at the end of GIFs on their website.
Last night, a fan stumbled upon a link that flashed up at the end of a GIF on the Twenty One Pilots website.
The link led to a website, later another website, and ultimately a whole boat-load of theorising.
Here’s what we know so far:
Yesterday, a fan stumbled across this URL at the end of the Car Radio GIF on the band’s official website.
The link led fans to an interesting website – where all the capitalised letters in the text spell out EAST IS UP.
It reads: “You are in violation. They mustn’t know you were here. No one should ever find out about this. You can never tell anyone about this — for the sake of the others’ survival, you must keep this silent. We must keep silent. No one can know. No one can know. No one can know.”
Creepy, right?
But that wasn’t the end of it – a fan decided to paste the ‘violation code’ at the end of the text into the URL, and that’s when things really got interesting.
Another website popped up, with a bunch of files relating to a Zoroastrian structure called a ‘Tower of Silence.’ This was a tower ancient civilisations used to dispose of their dead by exposing them to vultures.
The capitalised letters, again, read EAST IS UP. Some Twitter fans have also theorised that the nine circles at the centre of this image could relate to the circles on the Blurryface album. Perhaps, again, stressing that ‘Blurryface’ is dead.
Interesting stuff.
There’s also this letter from ‘Clancy’ which talks about their “9th year” and referencing “dema” – which are both very interesting when you consider the context.
It’s been nine years since Twenty One Pilots formed, and in an acceptance speech for the APMAs last summer, drummer Josh Dun said Tyler Joseph wished he could be there, but he was too busy “cutting ties with dema.”
Tower of Dema is another name for the Tower of Silence theorised before.
Another thing to note are the dates at the top of these images. Decoded from ’12 Moon 01′ and so on, they all seem to be significant dates for the band.
‘013 01 Moon 08’ could translate to January 8, 2013 – the day Vessel was released. Others have been considered to denote Tyler and Josh’s birthdays, and the release of their self-titled album.
There’s been a tonne more theorising by dedicated Clique members on Twitter, but these are the basics to get you up to speed.
Whether this is setting up lore for their next album, or a red herring hidden in plain sight, it seems too convenient that fans found this link ‘hidden’ on the band’s official website.
Even more, it’s all along a theme that has been plastered across their Twitter header for months.
But then again, Twenty One Pilots have pulled similar stunts before, and we can only hope this means an album is on its way.
What do you make of last night’s revelations? Let us know @CelebMix.