Who the heck was Panic! At The Disco?

One of the most interesting things you can look into about a band is its history. Bands with stories of affairs, lost members and gained members, lost albums and changed lyrics. And there’s probably no band with a more complex and plot-twisty history than Las Vegas’ own: Panic! At The Disco.

Think you’ve never heard of them? Think again. They’re the guys behind songs like I Write Sins Not Tragedies.

Now Panic at the disco started as nothing more than a high school cover band between a kid named Ryan Ross and his childhood bestie Spencer Smith. The two covered Blink-182 and early Fall Out Boy songs together in their high school music room, with Ryan on
vocals and Spencer on the drums. With a few other friends on guitar and bass, Panic at the disco was formed.

In the early days, Ryan was releasing the band demos on a now-defunct website: Live Journal, where he was internet famous in the emo scene. Eventually the music caught the attention of Fall Out Boy bass player, songwriter and emo sweetheart: Pete Wentz. Pete went to visit the band and soon signed them to his up and coming record label and they began work on a debut album.

But it wasn’t long before the band parted with their first guitarist and brought on a young Brendon Urie as a replacement.

Although Brendon was just supposed to play guitar for a little while, the rest of the band soon found that this guy has pipes. Ryan offered him the position as lead singer for the band’s first record: A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. The LP would release on September 27th of 2005 (so yes, it did just turn 20). The album saw roaring success for the teenage members, and they toured around the country for 2 years before returning to Nevada to begin work on their sophomore album.

Pretty. Odd. would be the band’s last album made with all of the original members: Brendon Urie, Ryan Ross, Spencer Smith and Jon Walker. The band split right down the middle in 2009, right after finishing up a tour, citing “creative differences”.

But it wasn’t that simple. Most fans believe that a feud between Ryan as the main lyricist and Brendon as the ever-so-popular lead vocalist led to the split. Pretty. Odd. was very sonically different from their debut, going for more of a Beach Boys/Beatles vibe than an emo rock album. Brendon didn’t see a future of success with that style, but Ryan loved it too much to move on from it.

An agreement was made for neither party to continue using the band name as it would give them a leg-up in the industry. Ryan and Jon stuck to this rule and named their band “The Young Veins”, who would release one album and then go into indefinite hiatus. But Brendon
and Spencer continued to operate under the Panic name, and it bolstered them to much higher fame than that of their former bandmates.

Enough so that even after Spencer split off from the band, Brendon Urie was able to use the panic name to hold up a near-decade long solo career.

Which led to a significant style change, into hits like High Hopes. The story goes that the fame and creative throne that the band’s situation gave him elevated Brendon into the pop style, which a lot of other emo bands of their era fell into. Meaning, Panic at the disco as it’s been known since 2013 is Brendon Urie. But the Panic at the disco I know is a high school band thrust into fame before their heads had developed.

The rabbit hole of Panic lore runs so much deeper than I’ve covered here, and perhaps I’ll make a series out of the history of this band and all their mind blowing stories. Consider this your brief history in the meantime.

Header Image by Sierra McCool.

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