Fans cried, screamed and healed with Pierce the Veil at ACL Festival

If the Austin City Limits Music Festival is a pop music state of the union, then it had to include emo. The oft-derided, mall-punk subgenre had a renaissance in 2025. By which I mean emo tangentially came up in the “Superman” movie.

In James Gunn’s version, ‘90s-born Clark Kent in small-town Kansas was an emo kid. Because at the turn of the century, underground teen angst became commodified by American record labels that bought up Fall Out Boys like trading cards — emo became the definitive sound of the suburbs.

When Lois Lane grills Clark Kent for his uncool music taste and says one of his favorite bands isn’t punk, his defense is: “Well, a lot of people love ‘em.”

He might as well have been talking about Pierce the Veil. The San Diego emo band — more Hawthorne Heights, Underoath, Thrice-era screamo, really— met its true believers on the T-Mobile stage Saturday.

You know how cameras at ACL scan patrons to feature on the big screens, and it’s hard when future one-hit wonders like Role Model are playing “Today Show” summer concert series pop music to find people who are mouthing along? Not here.

This reporter was floored by the diversity and passion from teary-eyed fans singing their hearts out — Hispanic women recording while they sang along to “Hold On Till May,” yellow-haired punks, rolling waves of the ex-punks who sold out Emo’s this year just to watch The Used play its 2002 self-titled record.

“Your only job today is to have a good time,” singer Vic Fuentes said. He didn’t chat a ton, but he did scream like the emo elders on the better Victory Records compilations  — guttural, primal. Most of his band’s instrumental breakdowns were mental ones too.

He’s had a brutal year. In May, his band lost its manager and several close friends and colleagues when a private jet crashed. The band had just played Madison Square Garden as headliners, and their loved ones were flying back home from New York City to San Diego.

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

Suddenly, a lifetime of lyrics like “I think about my life without you. I start to cry,” from “Circles,” gain another layer of meaning. At Zilker, it led to palpable moshing.

To be an emo fan as an adult is kind of like being in “Fight Club.” You don’t talk about “Fight Club.” But you have at least one soliloquy about the self versus the world that served as the spoken word intro to an emo album memorized. (Mine is from Refused’s “Shape of Punk To Come.”)

And as an emo fan, I laugh when people complain about dust and heat at ACL. Brother, I was at Ozzfest and Warped Tour in 2001. I watched Hatebreed in a parking lot in July in Selma, Texas. I was in the pit.

On this day, Pierce the Veil muscled through nine corporatized-for-commerce anthems. People connected, especially with set closer “King for a Day.” And those of us who liked to egg houses in high school and now live in fear of getting too hammered at the holiday party and punching a wall felt seen.