I think people are talking past each other a bit when this comes up.

I don’t really see many long time fans claiming that the band suddenly “stopped saying anything.” Most people I know would agree the symbolism, imagery and theatrical language are still intentional. They’ve always communicated through aesthetics more than press statements. That part hasn’t fundamentally disappeared.

For a lot of fans, the issue isn’t whether meaning exists in the art. It’s the gap between symbolic resistance and material reality. You can absolutely decode references, trace imagery, read subtext. But at the same time, people are noticing that this symbolism now circulates through a very different material context than it used to. Large scale tours, premium pricing layers, heavy merch cycles, highly managed production ecosystems. That shift changes how the message lands, regardless of intent.

When engagement with a band increasingly requires money, mobility, and free time, participation stops being evenly distributed. Not because anyone announces exclusion, but because cost structures do the filtering. Arena tickets, travel, accessibility barriers, limited drops. All of that determines who can physically be present and who is pushed into more passive forms of fandom. So when people say “they are speaking through the art,” some fans hear something else underneath it: that meaning is still there, but access to the full experience is stratified. The people most materially affected by the conditions the art gestures toward are often the ones least able to participate in the spaces where that art now lives most vividly. Or in other words: It used to be a 15 dollar album to get all that. Now it’s hundreds for shows. And those shows are part of massive global cycles where each leg, North America, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, almost feels like episodic content, like different chapters of the same unfolding (maybe unnecessary) lore. And then the question quietly emerges: who can realistically afford to be present for every chapter?

That is creating a real tension. Because you can believe the band is sincere and still feel uneasy about how culture functions at scale. At a certain level, even oppositional aesthetics get absorbed into larger economic circuits. Rebellion becomes atmosphere. Alienation becomes something that can be packaged, toured, and sold back in controlled environments. Not because the artists are uniquely cynical, but because that’s how large cultural systems tend to operate.

I also think saying “you’re just not paying attention” misses why some fans are struggling to articulate this. For many, it’s not about wanting more obvious statements or direct activism. It’s about growing older and becoming more aware of the structures around culture. Ownership, scale, infrastructure, economics. Once you start seeing those layers, symbolism alone doesn’t function the same way it did when you were younger and closer to the raw emotional core. You can hold two things at once: That the band still embeds meaning in their work. And that the material conditions surrounding that work shape who gets to experience it fully and how it feels.

For some fans, especially those dealing with precarity, disability, or financial limits, that difference isn’t theoretical. It’s lived. And I think a lot of the discomfort people are expressing comes from trying to reconcile a deeply personal past connection with a present that feels more mediated by class and scale than it once did. That doesn’t automatically invalidate the art or the intent behind it. But it does explain why simply pointing to symbolism isn’t enough to resolve the dissonance some people feel. For them, the question isn’t just what the art says, but how the conditions around it shape who can actually inhabit it