There comes a time in every metalcore band’s career when they must decide: clean vocals or no clean vocals? For bands operating in a genre premised on harsh screams and brutal breakdowns, bringing more conventional rock melodies into the fold can either backfire horribly or pay enormous dividends. Thankfully, for Pittsburgh’s 156/silence, the latter has been the case.
Since their fifth album, People Watching, dropped in September of 2024, the quintet have sneakily become one of the biggest active bands to spawn from Pittsburgh’s heavy music scene. In January, they sold out the big room of New Kensington hardcore hub Preserving, playing for hundreds of ecstatic headbangers who sang and swung along to the moody, menacing bangers that encompass People Watching. For reference, their previous hometown release show back in 2021 went down at the quaint DIY habitat Mr. Roboto Project — meaning their audience has more than doubled in just a few year’s time. And they’re not only beloved in Pittsburgh. Roughly half of the dates on 156/silence’s nationwide winter tour were sold out, a statistic that still boggles singer Jack Murray’s mind given how long the band’s been grinding to get to this point.
“The first headline tour I did with 156/silence was in 2018, and we played an entire tour for nobody,” Murray tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “We played shows for literally two people, one person.”
For years, 156/silence were local misfits on the precipice of breaking out nationally but never quite getting there. They’ve toured consistently, including with big-name acts like The Acacia Strain and Unearth, and have been signed to the heavyweight metalcore label SharpTone Records (August Burns Red, Loathe) since 2020.
However, the band, which started in 2015 with a different singer and a much different sound, never managed to scale beyond in-the-know metalcore heads with the skronky, vein-popping blitzes that encompassed People Watching’s predecessor LPs (2018’s Undercover Scumbag, 2020’s Irrational Pull, 2022’s Narrative). Heading into their 10th year as a band, 156/silence felt they needed to take a big swing, and with People Watching, they refurbished their sound with sleek choruses, upgraded production and songwriting motifs that rely as much on atmosphere as they do acidic heaviness.
“There were definitely talks of it being kind of a make-or-break record,” Murray recalls, thinking about how much energy he and his bandmates invested in 156/silence in the years prior. “Because there’s so much work [that goes into] touring and sacrifices we have to make. We all have lives, we all have jobs, and it definitely takes a toll on your brain.”
Both in scale and sound, this current iteration of 156/silence is nearly unrecognizable from where they began. Original vocalist Mike Ernst named the band after a measure count he read on a piece of sheet music, and that artsy connotation was more in line with the initial idea for the band: to blend the poetic post-hardcore of La Dispute and Being As an Ocean with the frenetic metalcore of The Chariot.
After their sole 2016 LP with that oddball sonic mixture, Ernst departed the band, and guitarist Jim Howell became 156/silence’s primary songwriter, pulling the group in a heavier, more overtly hardcore direction with their sophomore effort, Undercover Scumbag. That was the first record to feature the frenetic shrieks of Murray, an ambitious young vocalist whose old band opened a 156/silence gig that was so impressive that Murray began fantasizing about switching teams.
“Every other band played on the stage, but [156/silence] played on the floor with the crowd,” Murray remembers. “I was like, ‘wow, I want to be in that band.’”
After Undercover Scumbag and their equally heavy follow-up, Irrational Pull, 156/silence had some minor buzz outside Pittsburgh, but within the city limits, they had yet to find their place in the fickle hardcore landscape.
“The Pittsburgh scene is weird; it always has been,” Murray says. “Until Preserving came out, the local scene was just cliquey. You’re either cool or you’re not, and for so long we weren’t cool.”
Nevertheless, the band kept pushing, and with the inflated popularity of hardcore and its associated sub-genres coming out of COVID lockdown, there was more space in the zeitgeist for a band like 156/silence, who began organically pulling in elements of nu-metal on 2022’s Narrative, finding common ground with other respected contemporaries like Boston’s Vein and Nashville’s Orthodox.
For People Watching, Murray and his bandmates knew they wanted to take things a step further with full-bore rock parts, a risky maneuver that could’ve isolated their hardcore loyalists and left them scrambling if it didn’t cross over into the much more hook-friendly metalcore world. Murray remembers telling Howell he hoped the record would be 156/silence’s Sempiternal, referring to Bring Me the Horizon’s craftily catchy 2013 breakthrough that pushed metalcore into a new era and launched the band to untold heights. Again, 156/silence were fully aware of how polarizing People Watching’s pivot might be, all the way down to its terrifyingly uncanny cover art of a demented smiling man that’s inspired by Aphex Twin’s iconic grinning visage, and has taken on a meme-driven life of its own throughout the internet, appearing in unrelated YouTube videos and brain rot memes.
“People either love it or absolutely hate it,” Murray says of the cover. “Like, ‘I don’t want to look at that, I’m not buying that t-shirt.’”
Musically, People Watching may have turned off some fans with gnarlier proclivities (though there’s still plenty of heavy within its tracklist), but the tepid shrugs are far outweighed by the tens of thousands of diehard fans who’ve joined the 156/silence fold since its arrival. Although Murray calls it “boring numbers stuff,” he’s proud of how many monthly listeners the group now have on Spotify, and even more grateful that that digital metric translated into real-life fandom on the road. Their aforementioned co-headlining tour with Illinois metalcore crew VCTMS was a rousing success, especially in far-away cities where 156/silence used to expect no more than a handful of heads at their gigs.
“We didn’t know if 30 or 40 people would even come to some of these shows,” Murray says. “And hundreds of people were coming out in Lubbock, Texas on a fucking Monday or Tuesday. That was unheard of before.”
156/silence have come this far, and they’re not slowing down for the rest of 2025. More touring is on the books for the remainder of the year, including a spring trek opening for metalcore genre kingpins Silent Planet and Invent Animate, which will put the band in front of some of their biggest audiences yet. The band have serious wind in their sails right now and some major opportunities ahead of them — but don’t think they’ve gone full rockstar. Murray’s reason for pursuing the band remains the same as it always has been (“I just like to make music and perform breakdowns with my buddies”), and if things keep going in 156/silence’s favor, he might even be able to quit his dayjob and commit to mosh music full time.
“I’d love to not pour concrete anymore,” Murray deadpans with a grin. “That’s what I would really, really, really love.”
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2025.
