Twenty One Pilots shows are a lot of things: a celebration, a benediction and a chance for the Skeleton Clique to reconnect, dress up in their finest Blurryface drag and shout along to the anthems that make them feel alive and happy to have made it to this moment together.
Thursday night’s (Sept. 18) kick off of the duo’s 2025 Clancy Tour: Breach outing at TQL Stadium in Cincinnati, was all of those things, with the added bonus for singer Tyler Joseph and drummer Josh Dun of hearing their extended family lustily sing every lyric to a handful of songs from their barely week-old Breach album back to them as if they were already decades-old canon.
If you’ve ever attended one of the Columbus, Ohio-bred band’s shows — and I’ve seen more than a dozen — this was no surprise. Before a single note was played at the two-hour-plus blowout, you could already feel the excitement and buzz brewing as you walked up to the city’s major league soccer stadium. Thousands of Clique-rs were parading around in official, and homemade merch and costumes paying homage to the group’s decade-long Blurryface saga, including ones with their throats and hands drenched in black paint à la Joseph’s stage and music video persona, to ominous red-robed ghouls drifting around like the Bishops from the fictional city of Dema.
From grade schoolers to their moms, dads, older siblings and friend groups, the feeling that everyone here was part of the show was palpable. And once Joseph and Dun finally took the stage after a bouncy set from openers Dayglow, it was on, as 21P treated the 21,000 fans to a high-energy run through songs from their across their catalog, including the live debuts of four songs from eighth LP Breach, which dropped last Friday.
The expansive, 27-song, pyro-filled set leaned heavily into the twisty lore of the now decade-long Blurryface saga, which launched in 2015 with the Blurryface album, and continued on subsequent LPs Trench (2018), Clancy (2024) and Breach.
Joseph admitted that some bits of the show were still getting ironed-out during the first night, but if either man was nervous about the step-up to stadium status it didn’t show, as they paraded through the floor several times to get up-close-and-personal with the Skeleton crew that has made their dreams come true.
Below, check out the 10 best moments from the opening night of Twenty One Pilots’ The Clancy Tour: Breach outing. (And click here for the full setlist from night one.)
