2009-Tyler Joseph
Josh Dun
The band name Twenty One Pilots serves as a credo for the duo: In the Arthur Miller play All My Sons, a World War II contractor delivers defective airplane parts because fixing the error will be expensive. As a result, 21 pilots are killed. The story reminds Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun that they should avoid shortcuts and act with integrity.
Joseph is the lead singer but also contributes percussion, piano, bass and ukulele. Dun mostly handles the rhythm section, often triggering prerecorded tracks to augment the sound.
Joseph was home schooled for a while, which included training in basketball: his mother made him take 500 shots every day. He was offered a basketball scholarship to Otterbein University, but turned it down to pursue music.
They are from Columbus, Ohio, home of Ohio State University. Students there made up much of their early fanbase.
During their Blurryface era, Tyler Joseph wore black grease paint on his arms, hands and neck when he performed. He said it represented his insecurities.
Joseph and Dun are also popular in the world of online fan fiction, with fans penning thousands of stories that reveal the guys as werewolves, vampires, and even secret lovers. But don't expect the guys to become fans of these tall tales any time soon. "When you start reading stuff like that, it does something weird to your mind," Dun says. "I worry if I read those stories it would change our friendship, so I don't look at them anymore."
Twenty One Pilots started out as a trio with Joseph and two of his high school buddies, Nick Thomas and Chris Salih. When Salih introduced Joseph to Dun, a fellow employee at Guitar Center, the two became fast friends. Dun joined the group when Thomas and Salih left in 2011.
During a hometown gig in 2013, Joseph and Dun were given "X" tattoos onstage to show their dedication to their Columbus fans. Joseph's is on his right biceps, while Dun's is on his neck behind his right ear. Joseph told the crowd: "Columbus, Ohio is where we're from and it will always be where we are from. Whenever someone asks what that X means, I am going to say this is for all of you."
Twenty One Pilots approach songwriting with their live performances in mind. Tyler Joseph revealed in a Z100 New York interview that they think about how a song will "feel and look live" even during the writing process. This focus stems from their early days playing in small clubs, where captivating an audience - sometimes just a bartender - was their main challenge. Their setlists often open with a high-energy song such as "
Overcompensate" to immediately engage the crowd.
The Skeleton Clique, the devoted fanbase of Twenty One Pilots, is named after the skeleton-themed hoodies the band popularized in their early years. Those hoodies, along with skull imagery and the phrase "Only skeleton bones remain," became visual trademarks around the era of the band's self-released indie record Regional at Best (2011).
In the Blurryface era, the band's visual universe expanded to include a stylized emblem that combines a skull-like figure and an alien head, which many fans adopted as the Clique's emblem. Within the community, the skeleton is understood to represent Tyler Joseph, reflecting his use of skeleton hoodies and face paint on stage, while the alien is seen as a stand-in for Josh Dun, who is known to lean into the extraterrestrial and otherworldly.
They're big fans of The White Stripes, another transgressive rock duo. When The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2025, Twenty One Pilots performed "
Seven Nation Army" in tribute. They said The Stripes showed them "it's possible to be any version of yourself that feels right."
