Heathens
Song Meaning
“Heathens” is Twenty One Pilots’ soundtrack contribution to “Suicide Squad,” using the film’s cast of misfits as a metaphor while warning the band’s own fanbase not to judge the outsiders now joining their ranks.
“Heathens” was written for the “Suicide Squad” soundtrack, and Tyler Joseph shaped it to mirror the movie’s themes while keeping it recognizably Twenty One Pilots 1. Lines like “you’ll never know the freak show sitting next to you” directly echo the film’s ensemble of dangerous, damaged characters 2. At the same time, the song doubles as a message to the band’s fanbase (the Skeleton Clique), cautioning longtime fans against dismissing the new “heathen” listeners drawn in by the band’s growing popularity 1.
The meaning
“Heathens” operates on two levels at once: it’s a piece of soundtrack work built to serve “Suicide Squad,” and it’s a piece of Twenty One Pilots mythology aimed squarely at their own audience. Tyler Joseph has said the song was crafted to fit the movie’s world while still feeling true to the duo’s identity, noting it “seemed to fit with the theme of the movie, and also what we go for” 1. That dual purpose shows up clearly in the writing itself.
On the movie side, the lyrics are stacked with references to the Suicide Squad’s roster of villains and outcasts. Lines like “you’ll never know the freak show sitting next to you” and “you’ll have some weird people sitting next to you” nod directly to the film’s motley crew of antiheroes, each hiding some violent or unsettling history 2. The verses’ talk of a “room of people who have rooms of people that they loved one day, locked away,” and warnings about psychopaths and murderers sitting nearby, reads as a tour through that same cast of dangerous, damaged characters.
But the song isn’t just movie tie-in filler. It also functions as a warning issued to the Skeleton Clique, Twenty One Pilots’ devoted fanbase, telling them not to look down on the “heathen” newcomers who’ve started showing up as the band’s popularity has exploded 1. Read this way, the chorus’s repeated instruction to “take it slow” and “wait for them to ask you who you know” becomes advice about how insiders and outsiders should feel each other out, rather than a description of literal criminals.
The song deliberately blurs the line between “outsider” and “threat.” Phrases like “we don’t deal with outsiders very well” and “they say newcomers have a certain smell” capture the wariness any tight-knit group feels toward new arrivals, whether that group is a fictional strike team or a real fandom absorbing a wave of new listeners. The outro’s line “it looks like you might be one of us” completes that arc, suggesting the newcomer has been tested and ultimately accepted.
Not every listener has landed on this reading. Some fans have taken the song more literally, guessing it describes an asylum or institution full of unstable people 1, which fits the surface imagery of locked-away patients and hand grenades for brains. But the combination of the film connection and the direct address to “my friends” suggests the song is less about a specific setting and more about the tension between belonging and suspicion, whether that plays out among comic-book criminals or among fans meeting each other for the first time.
Sources
Songs by Twenty One Pilots
Last updated 2026-07-29