And it was all going so well.
In early 2019, Bring Me The Horizon released amo. As frontman Oli Sykes said at the time, with their sixth album the band set out to be deliberately disruptive. The message was: “Whatever you might think or imagine about this album, don’t make up your mind until you’ve listened to it from start to finish. It’s not just heavy songs, it’s not just commercial hits, it’s not just mad electronic music, it’s not a full-on art piece It’s got bits of all of that.”
So, nothing was off the table, everything was up for grabs, and let the chips fall where they may. Sixteen years into their life, the Sheffield five-piece had earned the right and the space to, well, fuck things up.
The results?
“Shit that’s never happened to our band before,” replies Sykes now. There was a BRIT Award nomination, for Best Group, and two Grammy shouts, for Best Rock Album and Best Rock Song for Mantra. “We definitely felt like amo took us to some new places,” he adds, and he means that literally as well as figuratively – BMTH toured the world with amo, then toured some more. They had to: with amo debuting at Number One in 17 international territories, there was global hunger like never before for the multi-platinum-selling quintet. They even did a beautifully affecting cover of Billie Eilish’s when the party’s over for Radio 1’s Live Lounge.
Then, while on a run of Eastern European festivals last summer, they got the call for which songwriter Sykes – a computer game fiend, the band’s video director and co-producer, a man with 360 vision for what this band could be and where they could reach – had been waiting forever: would BMTH write a song for Death Stranding?
“That had been talked about for nearly as long as the game has been talked about,” recalls Sykes, a fan of the blockbuster computer game since long before its initial release in 2019. “But nothing ever came of it – until literally a week before the deadline.
“And this was Monday, and we had absolutely nothing. But Hideo Kojima who made Death Stranding is my favourite video game producer of all time – our song Shadow Moses is an ode to Metal Gear Solid, another of his games – so we had to try.”
He and keyboard player, co-producer and engineer Jordan Fish set up studio in hotel room, and dived into the lore of the game. “Hideo has a thing about this word ludens– Greek for man, the player, and this ethos about how human creativity is what makes us survive, persevere and prosper.”
This dovetailed with this long-term vegan doubling down on his interest in climate change and a shitty grab-bag of geo-political crises, all of which pushed him to wrote a song that’s “hopeful but devastated about the state of the world”.
Smashed out in five days in ad hoc hotel-bedroom studios across Madrid, Moscow and Kiev, with drums added in Bologna, Ludens was the result. Released last November, it’s a rhythmic, martial stomp with a dirty techno backbeat – and it’s the sound of BMTH popping off. Sykes’ video, too, was equally bracing, the images of a moshpit of placard-wielding protestors declaring “You Abused The Power” and a masked drummer leaping from the screen as the singer wonders: “How do we form a connection when we can’t even shake hands?”

As a way-marker for the next phase of their band, Ludens was perfect. As 2020 dawned, BMTH gathered in their Sheffield HQ and put their shoulder to the wheel for their next thrilling phase. And then…
“With Ludens, I thought I was writing about the distant future,” the frontman reflects wryly. “But in reality it was just around the corner.”

When lockdown bit, BMTH were scattered: Sykes, guitarist Lee Malia and drummer Matt Nicholls were in Sheffield. Fish was in “down south” in Newbury, Berkshire. Bassist Matt Kean was in Los Angeles.
Plans to write and record together were hastily scrambled and reassembled. The anti-socially distanced band had to find a way to coalesce and cohere, both in the songwriting and production processes, and round a new sense of meaning to their music.
Another pre-existing song offered a way forward. A sketched out version of a track called Parasite Eve was already in existence. But even in its rough form, like Ludens, it felt bang on the money and eerily prescient. Outraged, angry, emotional: Parasite Eve would be the perfect opener for a narrative EP Sykes envisaged as soundtracking these chaotic times.
Its title would tell it like it is.
Post Human: Survival Horror.
“To start the story, we knew we needed something darker, angrier, to reflect this period. And Parasite Eve became that song. Its name comes from an old survival/horror video game and, like Ludens, it was a mixture of our old sounds but then coupled with what we’ve been doing in more recent times: heavy but with the pop sensibilities we’ve learnt over the years.”
A sample of Erghen Diado from Bulgarian folk choir album Les Mysteres des Voix Bulgares was the perfect opener for Parasite Eve, like curtains parting to reveal a very real, very now horrorshow.
“It just encapsulates the idea of a pandemic – they way they sing those scales just makes you feel disquiet. It’s the sound of the zombie apocalypse,” he smiles.
“And that became the centrepiece of the record – songs that were reactive to the times, which was initially pure coincidence,” he continues. “Then that became exciting. What if we can record this music right now and get it out while people are still feeling this shit? What if we can do it at home?
“What could be more relevant, and what could be more meaningful?”

The creative taps now fully open, out poured Obey. As the band wrote, the songs’ heavier edge became paramount. “I wanted all the lyrics to feel dystopian, cyber-punky, with a doomsday video game feel to it. That was the brief for every song, and I think Obey has that most. The point of references came from Blade, The Matrix and films like that.
“And then I’d say the verse, the vocals took a bit of a Britpop turn. It just felt like something that Yungblud could do really well. We’d hung out a couple of times and got on really well. I saw myself in him when we were just starting out, speaking out, being himself, polarising people, people loved him, people didn’t get him. I thought he was just a real genuine kid.”
At the suggestion of Fish, Sykes sent the demo to his fellow Yorkshireman in LA, “and he texted back literally five seconds later: ‘I’m in. I’m going to the studio now!’”
Sykes jumped to it and stayed up all night online with Yungblud, working on the lyrics.
“And he just fucking killed it. You can hear the energy in the song, how immediate it was. By the next morning we had a completed song, that had come together in an organic but such an energetic way.”
Then, the creative torrent turned to Teardrops.
“It just feels like a classic, proper Bring Me The Horizon tune,” offers Sykes of a song that’s both giant and intimate, enraged and soulful, singalong and head-banging, “without feeling like anything we’ve done before. I think a lot of our fans value the emotion and connection they feel with our lyrics. I’ve always felt that in songs like Can You Feel My Heart and Sleepwalking – they just speak to so many people. And I think Teardrops is one of the best things we’ve ever done.”
Sykes recently completed filming of the video, including one day shooting himself underwater in a water tank.
“It’s me falling into a hole of depression, using the underwater scenes as a representation of how it feels to be lost or trapped in your own thoughts, to be weighed down by the burden of your mind.
“The song as a whole is about how much our society is toxic and harmful – which has been amplified even more this year – but we’ve all been oppressed… Then there are people who’ve really been oppressed, by police brutality in America. We’re getting beaten over the head every day with new news headlines, or social media. It’s really worrying for the generation that’s growing up into this, lost in their screens all the time.
“We’ve been traumatised by paranoia and fear – and now we’re numb to it. So the song is about all that, to be in that place.”

These songs – Parasite Eve, Teardrops, Obey, Ludens – are, chronologically, instalments in the nine-chapter narrative that is Post Human: Survival Horror.
Let’s not give away the full plot right here… not least because none of us know how this story is going to end, right? But we can introduce the other characters.
Helping with Sykes and Fish with production is Mick Gordon. He’s worked on “some really big video games like Doom, so he brought that element to it”. He also served: Zakk Cervini, who mixed the tracks in LA.
Step forward, too, Babymetal on the ferocious Kingslayer. “They made it sound like an anime theme tune, to be honest!” laughs Sykes. “Which is exactly what we wanted. And with it being the heaviest song on the album, definitely vocally, the contrast of going from this super brutal heavy verses, into this super melodic and cutesy Japanese singing just gives it a vibe like nothing we’ve ever had before.”
Then, on 1 x 1, we have Nova Twins, an act Sykes discovered on Spotify in lockdown. He had no idea who the London female duo were or where they were from. But he saw that they followed BMTH, so messaged them – and mutual love abounded. He thought they’d be perfect for the track, sent it over, “and Bob’s your uncle,” he grins. “Their vocals have an attitude that really fitted with the track.”
Finally, closing the album, we have the ultimate BMTH song – and song title: One Day The Only Butterflies Left Will Be In Your Chest As You March To Your Death.
“I’ve had that title, or a version of it, for ages,” admits Sykes, “but it was ‘butterflies in your stomach’, which is a bit more of a suggestion of love. And every time I wrote a song I’d try to get it in there, and Jordan would always say: ‘Nah mate, it’s not gonna work…’
“But then with this it finally worked, with the butterflies in your chest suggesting fear.
“I wanted the song to feel like a love song ballad, but it’s actually about our relationship with the planet. And Amy’s vocals represent Mother Earth, and I represent mankind.”
Amy is none other than Amy Lee, Evanescence’s inimitably glorious and powerful vocalist. “That song had a big operatic, classical feel, and she was perfect for it.”

This, then is Post Human: Survival Horror.
It’s a record made in lockdown, of lockdown. A set of songs constrained by pandemic, but also inspired by pandemic. A necessarily home-made nine-track EP, but one with true global reach and relevance.
A Bring Me The Horizon record, and then some.
“This is the first record we’ve written where the lyrics aren’t just directly about me and my experiences,” notes Oli Sykes. “That’s probably partly because I’ve always had something fairly traumatic to write about, whether it’s drug addiction or a break-up and divorce.
“So I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved, and it’s really exciting to be putting out a record that’s much bigger than myself and is about what’s happening now, in the world, to all of us, in real time.”
Because, as the man says, “when walking out your front door is potentially deadly, I don’t think it’s over-the-top to say it is survival horror.”
Yes, it was all going so well. Then it all went to shit. But Bring Me The Horizon, true to defiant, inventive, up-for-it form, have alchemised proper gold from that shit.

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