Album 1 may sound like it was recorded in someone’s basement, but it still charts on the Billboard 200 and has sold tens of thousands of copies. It’s utterly self-indulgent in the best way and represents Tyler in his free artistic form (and least artistically experienced). Every artist needs to spend time indulging their creativity in such a way, especially young artists.

And album 2 (Regional at Best) is a delight. Physical copies of the album are exceedingly rare but unofficial uploads on YouTube have collectively garnered millions of streams.

Regional at Best was self-released in 2011

So why doesn’t Tyler consider albums 1 and 2 part of the official canon?

According to Tyler, the band wasn’t “dreaming big then,” preoccupied I guess with rising up out of the local music scene. Albums 1 and 2 were “merely products he tossed together for the merchandise table.”

Oh really? They don’t seem like it. I’ve spent ten years or so digging through mountains of music as I’ve explored local music scenes searching for talent. I know what a garbage demo sounds like, and neither of these albums has that quality. There are an abundance of major budget album releases that sound like badly produced cash grabs compared to both of these treasures.

It’s impossible for me to listen to albums 1 and 2 and not hear heart, sincerity, passion, and hours of intense work and exemplary attention to detail. Local artists and college-age kids don’t record music of this caliber unless they believe in what they do and already have their sights set on world domination.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard artists dismiss their earlier releases. Maybe there’s just too much cringe in going back to early sketches, especially after a few years of international touring and recording with world-class producers. It must be like looking at your baby photos or remembering your first awkward kiss: a little emasculating, a little embarrassing, and quite vulnerable.

But for fans, these releases are an indulgence in the whimsical appeal of the band’s earliest days. They’re an inseparable part of the band’s identity.

Amateur as they may be, they’re dripping with artistic merit, signal flares of young men from middle America yearning to express profundity and novelty in the midst stereotypical suburban blandness.

Even back then, Tyler was reaching deep into his inner weirdness, far deeper than most of his peers. And while underground musicians often celebrate weirdness in a self-congratulatory way, early Twenty One Pilots weirdness was infused with a warmth and humanity lost on many avant-garde peers.

Expressing your own weirdness requires courage. To do so while retaining humanity and vulnerability requires far more.

But you can’t talk about the early days without bringing up the lack of Josh Dun.