Into The Music
Pierce the Veil has spent most of their career in the category of bands that critics qualified: huge for what they do, beloved by a specific audience, but not quite mainstream enough to get the chart mentions. That changed this week. Their song “So Far So Fake” just hit number one on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, the first chart-topper of their career. It took about twenty years to get here.
The band formed in San Diego in 2006 out of the wreckage of Before Today, the group that brothers Vic and Mike Fuentes had been playing in since high school. The Fuentes brothers, along with guitarist Tony Perry and bassist Jaime Preciado, spent the early years building a fanbase through relentless touring and a sound that was genuinely hard to categorize. Post-hardcore was the shorthand, but Pierce the Veil always had more melodic ambition than that tag suggested. Vic Fuentes’ vocals could pivot from scream to near-pop in the same bar, and the guitar work had a technical sophistication that appealed to people who grew up on prog rock as much as to the kids who found them through Warped Tour.
Their 2012 album Collide with the Sky is still the one most fans point to as the peak. It was a record that managed to be chaotic and polished at the same time, full of songs that went places you didn’t expect and hooks that landed anyway. “King for a Day” with Kellin Quinn from Sleeping with Sirens became one of the defining collaborations of that moment in scene music. It captured something that was happening in post-hardcore and alternative metalcore at the time, a willingness to go melodically huge without sacrificing any of the aggression.
The years between Collide with the Sky and now have been uneven. Misadventures in 2016 was a strong record that didn’t quite have the same momentum behind it. The band went quiet for a long stretch afterward, which is the kind of silence that sometimes signals a permanent end and sometimes turns into a reset. For Pierce the Veil it appears to have been the latter.
Getting a number one on Mainstream Rock Airplay in 2026 is a strange and specific achievement, but it’s also a meaningful one. It puts them on the same chart as bands they grew up alongside, and it confirms that the audience they built didn’t go anywhere. If “So Far So Fake” is a signal of what’s coming next from the band, the comeback is well underway.
They remain one of the most technically accomplished bands that scene produced, and one of the most underappreciated by anyone who wasn’t already paying close attention. That’s starting to change.