Film tie-in singles have a poor reputation, and with good reason. They tend to be hurried, generic and written to a brief that reads like a ransom note: must feel epic, must mention the hero, must sell tickets. So it was something of a shock in 2016 when “Heathens”, commissioned for the Suicide Squad soundtrack, turned out to be a hushed, sinister, strangely intimate piece of pop that outlived the film by a country mile. The movie was widely panned. The song, by the Ohio duo Twenty One Pilots, became one of the biggest hits of the year and a fixture of the streaming era. It’s a song about outsiders, suspicion and who gets to decide who belongs, and it works far better than anyone had a right to expect.
An unlikely commission
By 2016, Twenty One Pilots were already a phenomenon. Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun had spent years building a loyal following in Columbus, Ohio, before their breakthrough album Blurryface and its hit “Stressed Out” turned them into global stars. Joseph is an unusual pop frontman: a singer, rapper and pianist who writes with a confessional, anxious intensity, often about faith, doubt and the little voices that gnaw at the back of the mind. Dun, meanwhile, hits the drums with a kind of cheerful ferocity.
When the studio came calling, they were handed a film about a team of imprisoned villains recruited for a dangerous mission. It could have been an awkward fit. Instead, Joseph took the concept and used it as a springboard for something personal, borrowing the film’s theme of misfits thrown together and turning it into a reflection on who we label as dangerous and why.
What the song is about
The word “heathens” has religious overtones, historically used to describe people who fall outside an established faith. Joseph, who has often written about his own relationship with belief, plays with that idea. The narrator speaks to someone about to enter a room full of society’s rejects and warns them, with a mixture of menace and tenderness, that they should be careful. Everyone in the room has been judged, and some may be dangerous, but the narrator also seems to be one of them. The warning is ambiguous: is he threatening, protecting or simply stating a fact?
That ambiguity is what elevates the song. On one level it fits neatly into the world of the film, with its band of dangerous misfits. On another, it’s a broader comment on the way we sort people into categories, the saints and the sinners, the insiders and outsiders, without ever asking who drew the lines. By the end, the divide between heathens and the righteous feels much blurrier, and the person doing the judging seems to be implicated, too.
A hit that barely raises its voice
Musically, “Heathens” is remarkably spare. A low, creeping bass tone anchors the track, a few sparse percussion hits tick away like a nervous heartbeat, and Joseph delivers much of the vocal in a low, half-whispered croon that drifts between singing and rapping. There is no soaring chorus and no explosive drop. Instead, the song seems to lean towards you, speaking quietly, daring you to listen closely.
That restraint was a gamble in an era of maximalist pop. The charts in 2016 were crammed with big, glossy hooks and thumping beats, and here was a song that sounded as if it were playing from the next room. Yet it caught on, reaching the top five in the United States and becoming one of the most-streamed songs of its time. Perhaps listeners were hungry for something that felt quiet and a bit unnerving. A track that withholds its payoff is oddly compelling, and the duo understood that tension is more powerful than volume.
The film that nobody remembers
Here lies a small irony. The movie that gave rise to “Heathens” has largely faded from public memory, while the song continues to thrive. It’s a testament to how well it was written that it stands entirely apart from its source. You can listen to it without ever having seen a single frame of the film, and it makes perfect sense. The themes are universal enough that the cinematic context becomes an optional extra, like the cover of a book whose contents are far better than the artwork.
That independence has helped the song to endure. Fans have reinterpreted it as a statement of solidarity with anyone who feels like an outcast, a theme that resonates strongly with Twenty One Pilots’ audience, many of whom see the band as voices for people who feel awkward, anxious or misunderstood. Joseph’s lyrics rarely offer neat resolutions, which makes them ideal for the kind of repeated listening that streaming encourages.
Faith, doubt and a loaded word
It’s impossible to separate the song from its writer’s preoccupations. Joseph was raised in a religious household, and his lyrics have long wrestled with belief, uncertainty and the guilt that sometimes trails behind both. Against that background, “Heathens” becomes more than a comic-book companion piece. The word carries real weight for anyone who has grown up around organised religion, where a heathen is the one who stands outside the circle, the unconvinced and unconverted. Joseph turns the label into a badge of honour, or at least of kinship. The narrator isn’t sneering at the outcasts. He’s standing with them, and he knows precisely what it feels like to be looked at suspiciously by those on the inside. That personal stake gives the song a sincerity that a more cynical tie-in would have lacked, and it explains why listeners who had never seen the film still felt it was speaking to them.
The duo that refuses to sit still
Part of the reason “Heathens” worked is that Twenty One Pilots have never been confined to a single genre. Joseph moves between rapping and singing with fluid ease, and the duo borrow freely from hip-hop, pop, reggae and alternative rock, often within the span of a single song. That magpie approach can be a liability, but here it’s an asset. The track draws on the cadences of hip-hop in its verses and the hooks of pop in its refrain, while never quite belonging to either. Josh Dun’s drumming, restrained for much of the song, provides a crucial spine, and the pair’s famously athletic live shows ensure that the sombre mood translates into an electric communal moment. In concert, a hush falls over the crowd, then a thousand voices join in.
The power of a whisper
There’s a lesson in all this for anyone who writes commercial music. The temptation, when handed a high-profile commission, is to shout: bigger drums, bigger hook, bigger everything. Twenty One Pilots did the opposite, and the gamble paid off precisely because it was so unexpected. By pulling back, they made listeners lean in. The song’s quiet menace feels earned rather than manufactured, and its refusal to explode keeps it unsettling long after the final note.
Conclusion
“Heathens” is a song about judgement and belonging, dressed in the whisper of a thriller soundtrack. It asks who gets to be called dangerous, and hints that the answer says as much about the accuser as about the accused. Twenty One Pilots took a commercial assignment and turned it into something genuinely thoughtful, with a sound that’s as understated as it is memorable. Years later, it still has the power to make a room go quiet, and that’s a rare trick for a song that began life as a movie tie-in. Few film tie-ins can claim to have improved on their source material, but this one did, quietly and without fuss.