In 2019, Twenty One Pilots became the first act in US history to have every song on two separate albums certified gold, for 2013’s Vessel and 2015’s Blurryface. It’s an achievement suggestive of a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon, or at least a really great band. In reality, the Ohio duo specialise in an easily digestible but generally unremarkable slurry of rock, rap and synth-pop, their melodies appealing but hardly unforgettable. Aside from their voguish mix-and-match approach to genre, it is only their lyrics that offer any real clue to their huge popularity: the band’s frank dissection of mental-health struggles and emo-style vulnerability (“But now I’m insecure / And I care what people think,” goes their biggest hit, Stressed Out) is a mode that is both evergreen and all the rage.

And yet their sixth album moves away from this anxious melancholy. Good Day is a slice of wry but effervescent piano-pop that variously recalls the Beach Boys, Weezer and Mika; party anthem Saturday could easily be a Maroon 5 number; the cautiously hopeful Choker pairs an antsy breakbeat with saccharine pop-punk. By this stage, the duo have established a narrative and mythology (the album’s title is an anagram of Clancy Is Dead, a reference to the protagonist of their previous album Trench) intimate enough for diehard fans to view this shift as hard-won hopefulness after years of despair. For the uninitiated, it will seem a pleasingly buoyant, if conspicuously USP-less, soundtrack to a more universal anticipation of light at the end of a very long tunnel.