If you’re into low-fi, stripped-down songs, then I have great news for you: twenty one pilots have just dropped “The Hype (Berlin)”. And it’s good.
Really good.
The Columbus duo released the third addition to the “Location Session” singles on Oct. 17, after several short audio clips surfaced online the night before. The remix features a new beat, a new melody, and even new lyrics, but still managed to capture the humility and hopefulness of the upbeat original.
Hours after the song was officially released, the band uploaded a 5-minute video showcasing frontman Tyler Joseph’s reconstruction of the song merely 2 hours before he took the stage for Lollapalooza Berlin.
“I thought since I had so much fun reimagining some older songs off of Trench, I was gonna do that again today at a studio here for the song ‘The Hype’. We just have one day. We’ll see what happens,” Joseph said in the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHUAXMvtZvU
Previous Location Sessions include “Chlorine (19.4326° N, 99.1332° W)” and“Cut My Lip (40.6782°N, 73.9442° W)”, whose dates translate to Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York. Each Location Session title correlates with the city in which the remix was recorded, hence the name. Several lucky fans were even invited to see the live performance and recording of the “Chlorine” remix, as well as a few older ones. The full video of that live performance can be seen below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laLjSp3XC7A&t=901s
Fans were quick to point out that each of the single’s cover featured a yellow strip of tape. When laid next to each other and turned to face East, they began to arrange the band’s logo. Many fans speculated that the band would release two more Location Sessions that would complete the logo, but nothing has been confirmed yet.
Another interesting point made was that the “Cut My Lip” and “Chlorine” sessions featured the coordinates in their titles and led fans to decode the message themselves while “The Hype (Berlin)” featured the location right in the title. The band is well-known for its cryptic hidden messages, whether on a secret website or right in the music itself and this discrepancy, of course, led to many fan theories. However, I highly doubt the band will ever confirm the reason for this, as they tend to allow most of the things they release to be entirely up to interpretation.
Listen to “The Hype (Berlin)” on your favorite streaming device and let me know your thoughts or why you think the title is different in the comments!