Last week’s surprise return to full-throated deathcore turned out to carry a backstory. When Bring Me The Horizon dropped “Dehumanized” on June 25, their first brand-new song in that vein in years, the track landed alongside a graphic, hard-to-watch music video and immediately grabbed attention for its sheer heaviness. It’s set to close out the band’s reworked take on their 2006 debut, a 20th-anniversary re-recording titled Count Your Blessings | Repented, which arrives on July 10.
But the song’s origins run deeper than nostalgia for the band’s early sound. In an Instagram story posted around the single’s release, frontman Oli Sykes laid out what actually drove the lyrics and part of that story is a warning he says the band received about their politics.
Beyond citing the dystopian horror novel “Tender Is The Flesh” as a jumping-off point, Sykes connected the track to the backlash he’s taken for his humanitarian activism. According to him, he and his bandmates were told that waving Palestinian flags onstage during their 2025 sets at the Reading and Leeds festivals could put an end to their career.
Sykes explained in part (via theprp):
“This video was actually inspired by this book I’m reading rn called ‘Tender Is The Flesh‘. It’s f**ked, have a read if you can…”
“[‘Dehumanized‘] was born from an event that happened last year. I was told that peacefully raising a flag on stage in recognition of a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding where children were being killed would most likely carry career ending consequences.”
“It made me realise how we are silently we’re conditioned to suppress our humanity. We think were are free, conscious beings, when in truth we are driven by forces we barely understand.”
“‘Some of us are butchers, some of us are lambs, send me to the abbatoir, let’s find out which I am,’ is the crux of this song.”
“The abbatoir is a metphor for being put in a place where my very livelihood is facing execution.”
“When empathy becomes an act [of] anarchy, then u discover whether your values are real.”
“I want this video to take that central theme to the worst imaginable conclusion.”
“A fully operational human slaughterhouse.”
“Let’s ask the viewer at what point does suffering become unacceptable to u?”
“At what point do you draw the line?”
“Every time we’re taught to look away or stay quiet, we live a little bit more of who we are.”
“So the slaughter house is analogy for modern civ.”
“On top of that many of the lyrics reference this kind of setting…”
The warning Sykes describes is his own account of events; he did not name who delivered it, and no festival organizer has been identified or responded publicly. The presence of the Palestinian flag at UK festivals has been a flashpoint over the past year, with other acts reporting friction over displaying it, so his framing sits inside a wider and heavily contested debate rather than a settled set of facts.
Whatever the risk, the band went ahead. During both their Reading and Leeds headline slots in 2025, Palestinian flags were waved onstage alongside them — a moment that circulated widely in fan footage at the time and now sits at the center of “Dehumanized“.
