How big a deal was Pierce The Veil’s triumphant homecoming concert at Petco Park Saturday night? You may want to take notes.
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“This is the show were going to remember for the rest of our lives,” lead singer and rhythm guitarist Vic Fuentes told the cheering crowd of around 40,000, which heartily sang along to every selection in the nearly two-hour show. “This is the biggest venue we’ve ever played. This is the biggest crowd we’ve ever played for.”
The full-stadium concert, which sold out the same weekend it went on sale in January, was the closing date on the San Diego-bred band’s “I Can’t Hear You World Tour.” It marked their headlining triumph at the downtown ballpark, where Pierce The Veil last performed in 2024 as one of two openings act for fellow hometown favorites blink-182.
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Their 16-month “I Can’t Hear You” concert trek saw the four-man band sell more than 700,000 tickets and perform at such storied venues as New York’s Madison Square Garden and London’s Wembley Arena.
The Petco Park show came 20 years after Pierce The Veil’s 2006 formation, 11 years after the group headlined the national Vans Warped Tour in 2015, and 10 years after the band performed a mini-set at Petco Park as part of the 2016 MTV Fandom Fest held for Comic-Con attendees.
Fans sing along as Pierce the Veil performs during their hometown finale for the band’s “I Can’t Hear You World Tour” at Petco Park on Saturday. (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
To commemorate Saturday’s concert, The Finest Collective — the San Diego Padres’ hospitality and events division — put together an interactive Pierce The Veil Pop-Up Shop that was open Thursday through Saturday in the Candy Factory adjacent to Petco Park.
Further adding to the celebratory spirit, San Diego-born Stone Brewing on Aug. 29 launched a limited-edition Pierce The Veil IPA, jointly created by singer Fuentes and Stone Brewing Senior Manager of Brewing & Innovation Kris Ketcham. The special pale ale will also be available in Chicago at next weekend’s Riot Fest, where Pierce The Veil is headlining a lineup that includes the Patti Smith Group, Alanis Morissette, Elvis Costello, William Shatner and more than two-dozen other acts.
And there’s more. On Sept. 3, New York’s Prince St. Pizza launched a limited-edition Pierce The Veil-inspired pizza called La Chona — also the name of a 1995 norteño song by Los Tucanes de Tijuana — and a Pierce The Veil-themed pizza box. Sales of the spicy pepperoni, chorizo and jalapeños pie concluded on Sunday.
Bassist Preciado of Pierce the Veil performs with the band Saturday at Petco Park. (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
All of this reinforces what a very big deal Pierce The Veil has become. The band’s success has been made even more notable by the fact this plucky quartet — which once wryly described itself as “a bunch of Mexicans from San Diego” — has been operating largely under the mainstream radar since its inception in 2006.
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There have been no Grammy wins or even nominations, and no San Diego Music Awards wins for the group, whose music mixes elements of post-hardcore, emo, grunge, alternative-rock and more. (“We still consider ourselves a progressive-rock band,” Fuentes, a former SDSU student and major Queen fan, said in a 2007 Union-Tribune interview.)
At a packed Petco Park on Saturday night, Pierce The Veil seemed very much in its element. The ecstatic audience gave them a returning hero’s welcome perfectly suited for the occasion. In turn, Fuentes, lead guitarist Tony Perry, bassist/backing singer Jaime Preciado and drummer Lionel Robinson performed their well-crafted songs with palpable enthusiasm and well-honed precision.
Lead guitarist Tony Perry of Pierce The Veil was an energetic presence at the band’s Saturday concert at Petco Park/ (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The band opened with the powerful one-two punch of “Hell Above” and “Bulls In The Bronx,” a pair of pile-driving numbers that combine high-velocity impact and carefully calibrated dynamics in equal measure. They concluded 17 songs later with “King For a Day,” a potent anthem for tenacious underdogs who — much like Pierce The Veil — have bucked a system seemingly built to disenfranchise them.
“We grew up here and we always had a place to play in San Diego,” Fuentes, 43, told the audience, which roared back its approval.
The band’s arrival on stage was preceded by a mariachi quintet that performed a vocal-free, trumpet-led adaptation of Pierce The Veil’s 2012 song, “May These Noises Startle You in Your Sleep Tonight.” The quintet’s faces were painted in Dia de los Muertos sugar-skull style, as were the faces of the female dancers who joined the band during “Bulls In The Bronx.”
Dancers perform along with Pierce the Veil during their hometown finale for the I Can’t Hear You World Tour at Petco Park on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026 in San Diego, California. (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Highlights Saturday included the brightly tuneful lament “Circles,” the moody “I’d Rather Die Than Be Famous,” the pandemic-inspired “Pass The Nirvana” (whose lyrics include the refrain “I can’t hear you” that inspired the name of Pierce The Veil’s just-completed tour), the tragedy-tinged love song “I Don’t Care If You’re Contagious,” and the tender “Hold On Until May,” which featured a brief vocal cameo by Julia Wolf, one of the concert’s two opening acts.
Had Fuentes lost his voice early on in the night, it probably wouldn’t have mattered much. The audience, which knew every word to every song, happily sang every lyric from start to finish. Pierce The Veil’s songs — whether angry or hopeful, brash or melancholic, a call to arms or a secular invocation — strike a major chord with listeners who hear themselves reflected and acknowledged in each verse and chorus.
The result was a visceral communion between the mostly young crowd and the band, a mutual celebration that didn’t really need the periodic pyrotechnic bursts on stage or post-concert fireworks display to light up the evening and ignite time and again.