Abstract Many new physics models with strongly interacting sectors predict a mass hierarchy between the lightest vector meson and the lightest pseudoscalar mesons. We examine the power of jet substructure tools to extend the 7 TeV LHC sensitivity to these new states for the case of QCD octet mesons, considering both two gluon and two b-jet decay modes for the pseudoscalar mesons. We develop both a simple dijet search using only the jet mass and a more sophisticated jet substructure analysis, both of which can discover the composite octets in a dijet-like signature. The reach depends on the mass hierarchy between the vector and pseudoscalar mesons. We find that for the pseudoscalar-to-vector meson mass ratio below approximately 0.2 a simple dijet analysis with only the jet mass variable provides the best discovery limit; for a ratio between 0.2 and the QCD-like value of 0.3, the full jet substructure analysis has the best discovery potential; for a ratio above approximately 0.3, the standard four-jet analysis is more suitable.