Pierce the Veil: Kick your mind open

Pierce the Veil appear on the cover of the Fall 2024 Issue — head to the AP Shop to grab a copy.

Pierce the Veil came back from a five-year hiatus bigger than ever. 2016’s Misadventures had become an undisputed great in their time away from the stage, while their iconic breakout anthem “King for a Day” had been embraced by a new generation falling in love with emo for the first time. Rather than lean on what had come before, though, this new chapter of Pierce the Veil was driven by a desire to shake things up.

Ambitious, sure, but even the band weren’t expecting to spend a summer playing stadiums across North America with blink-182. With two days left of the tour, Pierce the Veil tell AltPress they’re still coming to terms with it. 

Read more: 10 criminally underrated blink-182 songs

Sure, the band have been staples of the pop-punk scene for nearly 15 years now, but it’s never been the easiest of fits. Fearlessly pulling from the worlds of post-hardcore and metalcore but not afraid of a sugary chorus, either, Pierce the Veil’s back catalog has consistently seen them as the most extreme band on every tour they’ve been a part of. “We’re either too heavy or not heavy enough,” bassist Jaime Preciado says from a hotel room in Toronto ahead of another massive show with blink. “I love being that black sheep band, though.”

Despite a renewed interest in the punk-rock scene of the ’00s and 2010s, Pierce the Veil’s latest album, The Jaws of Life, sees them double down on doing things their own way. Expanding every boundary the band have set for themselves, the record is more aggressive, more melodic, more tender, and more confident than everything that’s come before. “We really didn’t know how people were going to take it, but we knew it was the record we had to make,” vocalist Vic Fuentes offers. During the recording process, he even called up Fearless Records and warned them it was an album that might confuse fans, before promising the label that it was a good thing.

It’s been nothing but positivity since The Jaws of Life was released in February 2023. Not only has it become the band’s biggest-selling album, but an absolutely massive turnout for their set at Lollapalooza in Chicago suggests the band are approaching a real breakout moment, 18 years after they first formed in a Californian garage. A recent reworking of Radiohead’s “Karma Police” underlines Pierce the Veil’s desire to lean into all things playful and unexpected.

Cementing their legacy as an iconic band of the scene but proving there’s still plenty of ambition driving them forward, their tour with blink-182 has been the ultimate victory lap for The Jaws of Life. “Every night has felt so special, and every show has felt like a big moment. It’s all just been so amazing,” Fuentes says, with the band starting to look ahead to the future.

You’re in Toronto for the last few shows of this tour with blink-182. How has this whole run of shows been for you?

TONY PERRY: I’m not sure any of us ever thought we’d be a part of a tour like this. For the longest time, it didn’t seem like we fit in with a band like blink-182. I don’t think we believed we’d ever make the cut, so to actually be doing this, it feels like a dream come true.

JAIME PRECIADO: We thought it was a bit at first. We thought somebody was playing a cruel joke on us. It’s been a challenging experience, because we haven’t done a support tour like this in a really long time, but it’s been a fun, exciting challenge trying to win these crowds over. I can’t say nice enough things about the band, their crew, or their fans. It feels like we’re at the bottom of this new mountain that we get to climb, and that’s incredibly cool. When you’ve been a band as long as we have, you don’t get to do that a lot, so it’s really exciting to be doing these new things.

VIC FUENTES: It’s like trying to impress your new girlfriend’s parents. You have to put your best foot forward, and you’re trying to be the coolest dude they’ve ever met because you want them to like and accept you.  

Doing new things seems to be the driving force behind The Jaws of Life. What was the ambition going into that record?

FUENTES: After such a long time away, it just felt like we were all naturally yearning for something different. We knew everything we had done in the past couldn’t be repeated, so the natural thing was to try stuff that felt new to us. The ambition was to feel that uncomfortable feeling again. It’s the first record where we’ve gone in and not known exactly what we would be doing or where it would go.

PRECIADO: We wanted to evolve in a creative way. There are a lot of songs on The Jaws of Life that we couldn’t have made before now. We weren’t ready for a song like “Shared Trauma” before now. Ultimately, the mindset was, “Let’s just do it, because why not?”

Why take that risk then? Pierce the Veil hadn’t released an album in seven years, so coming back with an evolved version of the band could have gone very wrong…

FUENTES: For us, it didn’t feel like a risk. It felt like the only option. We just weren’t writing songs that sounded like the old ones, so we weren’t left with much of a choice. We had to follow where our guts were taking us. The hardest part about that was not getting scared and letting that fear become excitement. Ever since then, this whole album cycle has been about trying new things. I think that’s what I want us to do forever now, because it feels like the key to doing this for a long time is trying to do things that make you feel a little uncomfortable.

How validating was it when both old and new fans started really embracing this era of the band then?

FUENTES: I didn’t really feel comfortable until we stepped back onstage. That was the true test for us, because we had been gone for such a long time, and you really don’t know who’s going to stick around. As soon as we did those first few shows, everything just felt right. From then on, it has felt like a celebration.

What do you think inspires that loyalty?

FUENTES: A lot of it is time. You can’t buy the time we’ve put into playing small shows and building this community. There’s also something to be said for the style of music we play. Pierce the Veil has always made emotional music that touches people in a deeper way than perhaps a pop song might, and we’ve been sharing that connection with them since 2006.

Speaking of emotion, what were you singing about on The Jaws of Life, and has that changed over the past 18 months?

FUENTES: Each song has its own story, but “Pass the Nirvana” is a song that’s always growing for me. It was written during COVID when I could see all these kids cooped up and trying to get through a tough experience by finding whatever fun they could. I felt bad because no one should have to try that hard to have a good time. It was also inspired by the tension in America and how weird everything felt at the time. Everything still feels incredibly weird, and there’s still that anger and tension. That can be felt in the song, which is about those kids trying to grow up in a really strange world.

A lot of the album is about finding hope from a place of darkness, and this era of the band feels like a real celebration of perseverance but also isn’t afraid of embracing change, either. Does that feel like an important energy to be putting out into the world right now?

FUENTES: We didn’t write any of this album to make people feel a certain way. It was all for us, but if you’re singing about your real, honest feelings, you hope someone will resonate with it. I always tell people to just keep trying to push forward. As long as you’re moving forward, good things can happen. Every year, our fans use our song “Hold on Till May” to celebrate the fact they’ve made it through another 12 months. The song wasn’t about that originally, but it’s so cool that they’ve made it into this mental health awareness song that seems to get bigger every year.

PRECIADO: I love moments like that, and when we play something like “Resilience” live. I know those songs mean different things to different people, but there’s such a warmth when people unite over music like that. Those small connections are huge, and there’s no other way to describe it other than special.

There’s not a whole lot left on the calendar for Pierce the Veil after the blink tour — do you know what comes next for the band?

FUENTES: We’re definitely planning some stuff for next year. The loose plan is to try not to go away for years again. We want to try and keep things rolling a little more consistently. It’s always been a challenge, and I think we’re notoriously known for taking a long time between records, but with this new perspective of wanting to keep things ever-changing and challenging, we need to keep putting ourselves in unique, potentially uncomfortable situations. Whether that’s more shows [or] new music, the hope is to continue to feed off what’s happening right now and keep things moving.

PRECIADO: There’s a lot of fun stuff planned. The biggest compliment I’ve heard about this record is how it sounds like a band playing together in a room. And making The Jaws of Life really did bring us closer than we’ve ever been before as a band, which I think you can hear. The touring has been progressively more awesome as well, and it’s restarted the band in a really fun way. I’m excited to keep it going. We have some shows in October, and we’re at When We Were Young playing Collide With the Sky in full, which is going to be a big look backwards [and] something we wouldn’t really think to do.

How are you feeling about revisiting Collide With the Sky?

FUENTES: A little nervous, because we still need to relearn two songs. “The First Punch” is the fastest song we’ve ever written, and we’ve never played “One Hundred Sleepless Nights” live, so I have no idea how much of a challenge that is going to be. We’re going to do everything we can to make that show really special and exciting, though.

That festival has become a real celebration of pop-punk music, with the genre still getting bigger and more expansive. You’ve got newcomers like Olivia Rodrigo and Machine Gun Kelly, you’ve got classic bands finally getting their dues, and you’ve got songs like “King for a Day” constantly finding a new audience. What are your thoughts on this resurgence?

FUENTES: We need more kids playing instruments together in a room because there’s such power in that. Whatever makes that happen has my full support.

PRECIADO: The “King for a Day” thing is constantly shocking to me. I love that song, but I don’t get how people keep discovering it. 

So you’ve never been tempted to go full pop-punk nostalgia?

FUENTES: We thought about that when we first came back. We knew nostalgia was so big, so we spoke about how we could tap into that, but we quickly realized it wasn’t the direction we wanted to go in. Knowing we could move forward with confidence just felt so much more inspiring. The old stuff is always going to be there, and we’re always going to play it live. It is interesting how recently we’ve had fans asking for really old stuff from the first record, and we never knew there was that demand for it. We hear you. We always want to celebrate the older stuff, but the goal is to keep moving forward.

PRECIADO: On this tour especially, it feels like the band is gaining new fans every day. We want to cater to the old fans and the new fans, but our eyes are forwards, for sure.

I think that attitude is why people have always stuck by Pierce the Veil. You’ve never done the obvious thing, but you’ve always done what you believed in, rather than following a trend or a scene. Fans really resonate with that.

FUENTES: I don’t think trying to be authentic and working as hard as you can to make something that you yourself love will ever be played out. I don’t think we could make music trying to follow trends — I know, for me, that would be even harder than what we currently do, which is take inspiration from the things that we love and try to make it our own.

In terms of bands evolving and constantly changing, are there any that you look up to for inspiration?

PRECIADO: I mean, just being on tour with blink has been incredible. They’ve been through so much, they’ve changed so much, and they really did pave the way for bands like us. The first couple of shows, I had a tear in my eye when they ended with “One More Time,” and there were those clips of when they first started out. They really were three friends playing music together, and we’ve always looked up to that. But now they’re playing stadiums, which takes that to a whole other level.

FUENTES: I think even they’re blown away by what’s happening right now with this tour. They’ve spoken to us and said how two punk bands playing a stadium shouldn’t be a thing that’s happening, but here we are.

I guess with all this talk of the past, the present, and the future, what do you want Pierce the Veil to mean to people?

FUENTES: I love seeing how fearless our fans are with self-expression. When I was a kid, it was more about blending in because you were scared to stand out, but there are so many fans turning up to our shows who are showing themselves in the most vibrant ways. I hope that continues because it’s become a part of the culture. It’s in the music, and it’s so cool to see that reflected in our audiences.