Pierce the Veil Keep Their Emo Dream/Nightmare/Career Alive on First Album In Seven Years 

“Kick your thoughts open like a punk-rock present/Uppercut bleeding via a softened nostril/If you happen to didn’t come house injured would you say it was present?” sings Pierce the Veil’s Vic Fuentes on “Go the Nirvana,” the Nirvana-esque first single from their fifth album, The Jaws of Life. 

For emo followers now transferring into the “youngsters and mortgage” section of their life, that line would possibly conjure recollections of throwing your self right into a Warped Tour mosh pit — or at the least call to mind extra metaphorical coming-of-age cuts and bruises. Properly-timed nostalgia for emo’s 2010s golden age is a key promoting level right here, however Pierce the Veil’s comeback album additionally admirably strives to make their sound resonate just a little extra extensively than outdated followers would possibly count on. 

The Jaws of Life is Pierce the Veil’s first album since 2016, and their first LP with out unique drummer Mike Fuentes, who left the group resulting from allegations of sexual misconduct from two ladies,. Now, reconstituted, they’ve already been capable of finding success. Final yr, their 2012 single “King for a Day” reached the Quantity One spot on Billboard’s Onerous Rock Streaming chart after it went viral on TikTok, with everybody from Travis Barker’s son and Charli D’amelio to Lizzo leaping on the pattern of mouthing alongside to lyrics like “I’m uninterested in begging for the issues that I would like/I’m over sleeping like a canine on the ground.” 

The Jaws of Life sprawls out within the house between teenage music and teenage emotion, normally with predictable outcomes, generally in methods that may be just a little stunning. “Demise of an Executioner” provides synths to their sound, “12 Fractures” has a Nineties-grunge affect not seen of their earlier work, and the spotlight “Flawless Execution” is a mid-tempo ballad with trendy manufacturing touches. These detours all merge effectively with the band’s go-go post-hardcore sound. For followers searching for one thing akin to the hyperactive vitality of “King for a Day,” the fast-paced “Demise of an Executioner” comes shut, whereas not hitting the identical stage of earworm immediacy. The album is simply numerous sufficient to indicate some evolution, whereas harkening again to key moments from their previous. “Demise of an Executioner” may have been on 2010’s Egocentric Machines, whereas “Rattling the Man, Save the Empire” remembers their 2006 debut, A Aptitude for the Dramatic.

The songwriting right here is par for the course coming from a band whose lyrics are generally scrawled throughout Converse tennis footwear or made into Tumblr edits. “Even Once I’m Not With You” delivers highschool diary-entry ranges of first-crush romanticism; “Shared Trauma” recommends embracing your ache as a substitute of operating from it; and the slow-build acoustic-driven ballad “Resilience,” which opens with iconic dialogue from Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (“If I begin referring to those as one of the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself”), offers with determining the way to keep sane when teenage angst follows you into maturity. These guys appear to have discovered the precise steadiness to maintain going, and perhaps you possibly can, too – Warped Tour scars and all.