Two decades and half a dozen reinventions into their career, Bring Me The Horizon operate by a single creative law: never make the same record twice. And in a new interview, frontman Oli Sykes traced that restless philosophy all the way back to one terrifying gamble that he was briefly convinced had wrecked the band for good.
Talking with Esther Wang of “Estherini“, Sykes was asked whether Bring Me The Horizon‘s journey, from brutal deathcore beginnings to genre-melting, arena-sized alternative rock, pop and electronics, was a deliberate plan or something forced by circumstance. For him, it was simply the band following its instincts.
Sykes explained (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“I think it was just a natural progression. I think when we wrote our first album, [2006’s] Count Your Blessings, it was more derivative of the bands we loved, we were very inspired by. We just wanted to sound like X, Y and Z. It wasn’t like we were happy ripping off bands and just, like, ‘We just wanna sound like that.’ Whereas after that album, we were, like, ‘Okay, that actually went really well. What’s our sound? What do we wanna sound like? What makes us special and unique and sets us apart from everyone else?’ By the end of that album, there was a lot of bands that sounded like us, and we sounded like a lot of bands, and we were just, like, ‘Okay, we wanna step out of that world now, and we wanna make a sound that makes us feel different from everyone else.’ And we wrote this album called Suicide Season [2008]. And I remember when we first released it, when it first came out, the first week, people hated it. People were, like, ‘What the hell is this? They sound like nu metal. It sounds like Slipknot,’ which at the time was not the cool thing for this scene. And they were, like, ‘What’s wrong with his voice? Why is he not screaming as much anymore?’ And all this stuff. And I remember [thinking], like, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve like ruined our career.’ But then over the next few months, people started to get it. And it became this huge… Like, it just pushed us into the top of our game, really. And I think we took a big risk by doing that, and it paid off so well. It was another kind of internal kind of message to ourselves. We were, like, ‘Let’s always do that.'”
That early scare hardened into the principle that has governed everything since. Sykes described it as the band’s one unbreakable creative rule, and the engine behind their constant reinvention:
“Every time we write an album, we push ourselves again. We try and do something different. We never write the same album twice. That’s the only rule with our music, is we never write the same album twice. Because it worked, and it just kept working time and time again, and we were just, like, ‘What’s next?’ And I think just a creative desire to just go, ‘What’s next? What instruments? What mediums?’ As soon as we could get electronics and all that stuff, we just wanted to explore every avenue. We always felt like we needed a new thing. And that’s just always worked for us. And I think we’ll always be that band. We’ll never write the same album twice.”
That approach comes with an obvious risk, alienating fans with each new swerve, but Sykes said he made peace with that long ago. In his view, chasing an audience’s expectations is a guaranteed way to make bad music:
“Not anymore. Maybe at a time. But I’ve just realized that as soon as you start to try and think about what your fans want and you try and write music to either you think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna write this song. It’s gonna be huge,’ or you go, ‘I’m gonna write this song. This is what the fans are gonna want,’ it never plays out like that. It always fails, because that’s not how great music’s written. You don’t write music for someone else. You write music for yourself. You write music that really excites you. And that’s all we do. Every time we put out a record, every song on that record is, like, ‘I love this. In this moment, this is perfect for me.’ And, yeah, I know some people aren’t gonna like it, but at the end of the day, if I try and write music for those people, I’ll end up writing music that nobody likes. So all I can do is write music that I love, that excites me, and I think when you do that, if you love it, there’s gonna be all these other people out there that feel the same way. And if it’s genuine and it’s not contrived and it’s not forced, I think — that’s the thing with our music. Every album we’ve got is someone’s favorite album. There’s not a single album we’ve ever written where it’s, like, everyone agrees, ‘We hate that album,’ even if there’s an album we’ve got where less people like it and more people like this other one. I’ve heard every single song, like, people come up to me, ‘This is my favorite song.’ And I think that’s because even if you don’t like what we do, it never feels disingenuous. It’s always, like, this is what we wanna do. We’re not trying to write music to be bigger. We’re not trying to write music to be like someone else. It’s just this is genuinely what we like. And there’s been a couple of times where I’ve gone against that, and every time I’ve just [been], like, ‘Oh, that did not work.’ So it’s all I know. It’s the only way I know to write music and be successful, is to just make music that I love.”
There’s a neat irony in the timing of all this. For a band so committed to never looking back, Bring Me The Horizon have just done exactly that, sort of. On July 10, they released Count Your Blessings | Repented, a full 20th-anniversary re-recording of the very debut Sykes describes as derivative. True to form, though, the band didn’t simply reproduce the 2006 original. Framed by the group as a “reactivation” and “recontextualization,” the new version, reworked by Sykes and guitarist Lee Malia with sharper, heavier, more modern production, puts a fresh spin on early tracks like “Pray For Plagues,” “Slow Dance” and “A Lot Like Vegas.” Even when Bring Me The Horizon revisit their past, in other words, they refuse to leave it untouched.
