Still Holding On: Pierce the Veil’s Hard-won Victories Follow From Tragedy

Inside the Frolic Room in Hollywood, a small crowd of early drinkers leans up against the bar as an old Rolling Stones song blares overhead. It’s another hot day outside on the boulevard, but in here, it’s all shadowy glamour and laughter as the locals knock back one drink after another.

It’s not where the three members of Pierce the Veil would normally find themselves at lunchtime, on this day-trip to L.A. for meetings from their home base in San Diego. But the 91-year-old landmark tavern, with its classic neon sign above the front entrance, was a convenient spot for a rendezvous. 

The band is gathered around a little cocktail table by the cash machine. A framed picture of Mickey Rourke as a champion boozer in the film Barfly hangs on the wall. But our group is not exactly party central. Singer-guitarist Vic Fuentes and lead guitarist Tony Perry are drinking coffee, and bassist Jaime Preciado just finished a tall glass of ice-water. I’m having a Coke.

Pierce the Veil have been getting their thrills in other ways since the early 2023 release of The Jaws of Life, the band’s fifth album, and a tour that has the SoCal act playing major venues around the country, including three recent nights at the Forum in Los Angeles.

With a new single out from the expanded deluxe version of The Jaws of Life, the lush “Kiss Me Now,” the band were set to return to the road with two shows in Austin, Texas, on October 10 and 11.

The rise of Pierce the Veil, which formed in 2006, might have once seemed an unlikely destiny for a band of punks from San Diego, but Fuentes had high expectations. “I looked up to bands who came up in our genre who were doing it, like Paramore and Green Day—seeing that it is possible,” says the singer-guitarist. “I always hoped that we would find our way organically somehow.”

The members still live within 15 minutes of each other in San Diego, and often rehearse in a studio built at the home of Fuentes’s parents near Mission Bay. The band have expanded their sound in multiple ways since the early days, but they still look like dudes raised on hardcore in their T-shirts, sneakers, Doc Martens, and tattoos.

“I was in bands that played really fast SoCal punk, and really loved Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords and all those bands back in the day,” says Fuentes, clad in a frayed blue California T-shirt and backward baseball cap, the only band member sans tattoos. “That’s still in our music.”

Pierce the Veil was a guerilla operation in that early period, traveling to far-flung gigs in an RV, learning to be rockers from the ground up. It led not only to this moment of swelling popularity, but also established the resilience to go on after a tragedy within the band’s circle. Fuentes describes this last year as, “The highest highs and the lowest lows.”

On May 22, a crash of a private plane killed several of their close friends and colleagues, including longtime agent and manager Dave Shapiro. It happened after the band’s triumphant headlining concert at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, when Shapiro and the others flew back to San Diego, and crashed barely a mile from the airport. 

“I lost my whole crew, my buddies, and it was awful,” Fuentes says. “We’re still trying to, like, deal with it.”

Continuing to play the scheduled tour was all they could do, and Live Nation provided grief counseling to the band and crew still on the road. Preciado remembers seeing a girl in the crowd at one show holding up a sign. Rather than a song request, it simply read, “I hope you’re okay.”

“I was like, whew. I had to turn around,” he says of the emotional moment. “But that’s the kind of love that we have for our fans and I think they have right back for us. They realize that we’re dealing with this horrible thing that is just super-hard.”

Back in 2007, Pierce the Veil played one of their first-ever shows as a band right down the street from here at the now-defunct Knitting Factory. There was an audience of about a dozen witnesses, mostly friends and family. The band drove up from San Diego for the gig.

At the time, the band already had a record deal, and a debut album about to drop, A Flair for the Dramatic, recorded by Fuentes with his brother, Mike, on drums. Perry and Preciado had just left their own hardcore band to join up. And soon enough, the quartet were opening for other acts at the Whisky, the Troubadour, and other rock nightclubs, slowly building a career.

The true turning point came when they joined the annual Vans Warped Tour, where Pierce the Veil found themselves and their audience. For a band with a punk rock pedigree and few resources, Warped became a nurturing second home.

On their first Warped, Pierce the Veil shared a low-budget tour bus with 3OH!3. “It was the bottom of the barrel, but we treated it like it was a Rolls Royce,” Fuentes recalls with a smile. “At that time it was such a luxury.”

Perry says of that bandwagon, “I remember a cab driver bringing me back to the bus and I was like, ‘It’s that black one.’ He was like, ‘The janky one?’ I was like, ‘Oh, man.’”

The band signed up for four Warped caravans across the country, which Preciado remembers fondly as “a traveling circus.”

“Talk about the school of punk rock—you learn everything,” says Preciado. “Without Warped Tour, a lot of bands would not be where they’re at. That was definitely a jumpstart for the playbook of how to be in a punk rock band at the time. We learned so much from those shows.

“We would look forward to getting the call every summer, ’cause at the time, that was the biggest thing we’ve ever done, playing with some of our favorite bands and learning and trying to figure out who we were as a band. That was a really special time.”

Now that Pierce the Veil are headlining arenas, the Warped Tour is no longer a realistic venue for the band, but when Warped returned to action with three shows this year, Fuentes made a surprise solo appearance on the acoustic stage in Long Beach. “I love Warped Tour,” says the singer. “It’s really deep in us, you know?”

It was during their third Warped Tour that the band first sensed a shift in their fortunes, and they noticed a growing intensity in the crowd, following the 2012 release of their Collide with the Sky album. Their audience soon spread overseas to the U.K. and Australia, and that album has since been increasingly acclaimed as one of the era’s best.

“We were already in that zone of like, this is our third Warped Tour, but something was different that time when we played songs from that album,” Preciado remembers. “The crowds were different, the size, the emotion. It was the energy, you could just feel it. And that was something that we could like latch onto and be like, ‘Something is happening, let’s roll with it.’” 

Adds Fuentes, “One cool thing about Warped is that if growth is happening, you can see it, you can see your crowd growing.”

One song from that album had special resonance: “Hold on Till May,” embraced by fans as a motto for getting through difficult times, and holding on until things get better. It was originally written for a fan who committed suicide. Now, every May 1, the band receives thousands of messages declaring, “I held on till May!”

After 2016’s Misadventures, the road to Pierce the Veil’s fifth studio album, The Jaws of Life, was longer than anyone expected. It was finally recorded in New Orleans with producer Paul Meany, in a rented house in the French Quarter, where the band lived and set up a studio. It was the band’s first album in seven years.

“We always knew we were going to make a new record, but after that pandemic, we had to dust ourselves off and get back in the studio and tackle these songs that we’ve been playing around with for years,” says Fuentes. “We started writing it pre-pandemic and then everything just kind of stopped.

“Once we locked in Paul Meany as producer, it lit a big fire under us. We get to work with this producer who was very exciting and doing amazing things. That really got us super-inspired to continue making the best record we could.” 

For the album, Pierce the Veil recruited drummer Brad Hargreaves of Third Eye Blind. They all rehearsed the new songs together in Los Angeles before heading to New Orleans. Hargreaves wasn’t a random choice, as Third Eye Blind remains Fuentes’s favorite band from his adolescence, and he had already gotten to know the drummer.

Hargreaves even helped Fuentes and frequent collaborator Curtis Peoples write the song “The Divine Zero,” from Misadventures. Once they settled into their temporary house in the Big Easy, daily work typically began by 11:00 a.m., while Meany drove in from home. There was the main space where a control room was set up, and the back house was a secondary studio, plus more gear in the kitchen. The band sometimes worked into the night on their own.

In case things drifted into a mellow direction, they put a sign up that read: “More Teeth.”

“It was a great experience, man,” says Fuentes. “It was just living in that New Orleans world. The weather was perfect at that time. People would be walking by hearing us play and they would leave us little notes, like, ‘I like what I’m hearing guys. What band is this?’ 

The first song recorded for the album was “Pass the Nirvana,” originally just a working title for a track designed to “come out swinging with something aggressive,” says the singer-guitarist. Built on a growling guitar riff, and a hint of the dark undercurrent of the grunge legends, Fuentes rages a biting lyric and name-drops their producer: “Power until the target bleeds / This gun (this gun) will never turn on me / So, Paul Meany, will you drop that beat?”

It’s now one of Fuentes’s fave songs to play live. “It was one of the weirdest songs we’ve ever written,” he says. “It’s a strange tune and it was hard to figure out.”

A very different song on the album is “So Far So Fake,” which has since become a viral TikTok sensation, as fans post videos of themselves dancing to the song, with extra slinky butt moves. “I always thought we would have the sexiest trend in music,” Fuentes jokes. He also knows it’s inevitably brought new listeners into the Pierce the Veil fold.

“It’s very odd,” says Fuentes. “We had a big trend on TikTok with our song ‘King for a Day,’ and it was during a time when we were home, we didn’t have a record, we didn’t have touring. We were just sitting on our asses at home. Then all of a sudden this whole thing started happening. You just gotta sit back and be thankful for the fans doing it and just ride it and see what happens.”

Their experience making and performing The Jaws of Life has already informed how they will approach the next one, not with a second trip to New Orleans, but to another inspiring location.

“We’re already talking about what the experience could look like. I think we’re going to change the process from the last few records,” says Fuentes.

Preciado interjects, “The main thing is we don’t want to take seven years.”

Fuentes agrees and adds, “We want to keep the ball rolling and keep the creativity flowing. Our crew too—everyone around us that we work with is, like, in a great flow-state right now. From our tour manager to our graphic designer, everybody is just firing and we have a good team to create. So it’s a good time to keep things moving.”