Pierce the Veil scored their first-ever #1 Billboard airplay hit in 2023 with “Emergency Contact,” a single off the band’s latest album, The Jaws of Life. As bassist Jaime Preciado tells ABC Audio, the track’s lyrics reflect “that kinda morbid feeling of when does your emergency contact change.”
“At what point are you with somebody and that conversation does happen?” Preciado asks. “For me … it’s always [been] my parents, right? It was, like, my mom or my dad, and then it switched to my wife. And that moment of, like, ‘Hey, are we cool doing this?’ That’s what the whole song is about.”
A song about making such an adult decision makes for an interesting comparison to past Pierce the Veil material, such as the angst-ridden, TikTok-resurgent “King for a Day.” As the band members have gotten older, Preciado feels that the subject of matter of their lyrics has matured.
“Just with everyone, man, you grow up, you learn,” Preciado says. “We’re always trying to learn in life, and you have to kind of fail … you don’t learn a ton from succeeding. So we’re always trying to test different things.”
Along with new lyrical tones, that includes adding different flavors to the Pierce the Veil sound. On The Jaws of Life, for example, they brought in more ’90s and grunge-influenced sounds.
“At the end of the day, we’re still the same band, we’re still gonna have that kind of style,” Preciado says. “But, yeah, I think that’s just it, we’re just trying to write stuff that we appreciate now.”
“I have no idea what the next album’s gonna sound like,” he adds. “But we’ve always tried to take little baby steps in doing not the same thing over and over again.”
Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
