Trench

Lore & Background

In the Twenty One Pilots narrative, Trench is a city encircled by impenetrable walls, its population kept in a state of stasis under the rule of Dema. The nine figures known collectively as the Succubus—each with a distinct name and role—serve as the enforcers of that siege. They do not merely guard the walls; they maintain the psychological architecture that keeps the citizens from recognizing their own captivity. The band's characters, operating from outside or at the edges of the city, are the ones who attempt to crack the siege open, song by song, performance by performance.

The city is not simply a prison in a physical sense. Within the lore, Trench embodies the internal walls a person builds around their own vulnerability—the Blurryface that calcifies into something more permanent. Dema's rule mirrors the way a fixed identity or a fixed fear can wall off growth. The Nine, then, are not just external villains but personified aspects of the self that resist change: doubt, performance, numbness, and the small cruelties we inflict on ourselves to stay safe.

What makes Trench resonate with the fan community is its layered accessibility. Listeners can engage with it purely as a collection of songs, or they can descend into the narrative threads the band has woven across liner notes, music videos, and companion content. Either way, the walled city becomes a shared symbol: a place everyone has built around themselves, and a place that can, with enough collective will, be breached.

In Their Own Story

The walls of Trench hum at a frequency just below hearing. You feel it in your molars before you see the skyline—that low, grinding vibration of nine forces pressing inward, keeping the city sealed. Dema sits in the central tower, face turned toward the walls, never toward the people below. They go about their days in the grey streets, buying bread, mending shoes, never looking up. The Nine patrol the perimeter in their distinct silhouettes, and the band's characters press their palms against the outer stone, feeling the cold seep through their fingers. One of them whispers a lyric into the mortar. The wall shivers. Just a hairline crack. But through that crack, for one second, the people inside look up. And something in their eyes shifts. The Nine tighten their grip. The crack seals. But the vibration lingers in the city's bones, and no one can quite forget the sound of the stone trembling.

Reader's Guide

Trench was introduced as the narrative setting and title of Twenty One Pilots' fifth studio album, released in 2018 on Fueled by Ramen. It arrived as the direct continuation of the story seeded in Blurryface (2015), where the band's characters were already grappling with identity and internal conflict. Trench externalizes that struggle into a physical city under siege, giving the abstract themes a concrete geography.

The narrative developed across the album's tracklist, the accompanying music videos, and companion content the band released around the cycle. Songs like "Nico and the Niners" name the antagonists directly, while tracks such as "Jumpsuit" and "Levitate" dramatize the act of breaking through the walls. The lore positions the band's members as the characters attempting the breach, with Dema as the ruler maintaining the city's stasis and the Nine as the enforcers.

For the fan community, Trench matters because it transforms the band's catalog into a single, readable story. It gives listeners a shared vocabulary—the walls, the siege, the liberation—and a sense that each album is a chapter rather than a standalone product. The setting became a touchstone for fan art, theory discussions, and the collective excitement that built toward the narrative's next phase, Clancy, in 2024.

Did You Know?

• Trench functions as both the title of the 2018 album and the name of the walled city at the center of the band's extended narrative, making it one of the few entries in the lore that is simultaneously a place and a relea
• The nine antagonists of Trench, collectively called the Succubus, are each given individual names and roles, turning a simple 'villain group' into a cast of distinct narrative figures fans can theorize about separately.
• The Trench narrative is explicitly positioned as a continuation of the story begun in Blurryface (2015), meaning the walled city builds on themes of identity and internal conflict the band had been developing since at le
• The lore's central metaphor—walls built around a person's vulnerability, enforced by personified aspects of the self—gives Trench a psychological reading that resonates beyond the band's music into broader fan interpreta