Bring Me the Horizon

Suicide Season will be the deciding factor in Bring Me The Horizon’s acceptance into, or rejection from, the heavy music scene. Their first full-length release, Count Your Blessings, was the young band’s introduction; it featured deathcore-styled music that focused on non-stop guitar attacks, fierce technical drumming and the heaviest vocals Oliver Sykes could conjure. Wanting to grow and mature while remaining faithful to their style, BMTH have done exactly that by adding more accessibility to their music while evolving Sykes’ vocal approach. "Chelsea Smile” and "It Was Written In Blood” shows musical development from the band, with catchier rhythms, lessened guttural vocals and more structured songwriting, as opposed to reverting to a technical onslaught of guitar riffs. BMTH haven’t sold out their prior sound by any means, and even the aforementioned songs have segments of thrash guitars, pounding bass and spleen-rupturing vocals that are reinforced by "Football Season Is Over” and "Death Breath,” where they revert closely to their heavier, death-laced style. Suicide Season is a great progression from the young Sheffield, England band that rightly graduated from maiming their instruments and now look to imprint themselves on the heavy music scene.

What was the main goal with Suicide Season?
Sykes: What we wanted to do was something completely different than the CD we did before, Count Your Blessings. We kind of wanted to try a whole bunch of new things that other bands aren’t doing and see what we could do with what we’ve got. I don’t really know that we had a goal. Do you know what I mean? We just wrote our songs and got on with it.

You seem like you’re having a lot more fun on this record.
Yeah, man, definitely. We came up with a solution to test the boundaries of what a genre should be and decided, "fuck it, we’ll just do whatever.” It doesn’t matter if people think it’s stupid or silly or whatever. We are just going to do whatever we want to do. It definitely came out more fun and more fun to play live and it’s more bouncy and catchier, I think.

Do you feel like too many bands in heavy music take themselves too seriously?
I think some of them can. There are a lot of bands that think being in a band is purely business and it’s all work. You know, you write your album and you play your shows and you go back to your bus and sleep. For me, it’s a bit different. I mean, yeah, it’s our job because we’ve put a lot of effort into what we wrote and what we do live but at the same time, you’ve been given this opportunity and it’s the best fucking thing in the world. Some bands can’t wait to get home and have a holiday but for me, and I think the rest of the band, this is it. You know going home is the bad part and that’s the work. Being on tour is really like your holiday; you get to be in different city every day and partying and getting to do what ever the fuck you want really. You play a show for an hour every night, which is also amazing. When you treat it as just a job and can’t wait to get home, that’s not right.

"Chelsea Smile” and "It Was Written In Blood” have some catchy rhythms. What made you decide to take that approach?
I don’t know. I think we’ve always wanted to be a really heavy band, and will continue to be, but I think it’s good when a band can be really heavy and still have catchy hooks and riffs without it being cheesy and typical. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make the heaviest and catchiest music possible.

Judging from your cover art, is there some theme of distaste towards women?
In Suicide Season there really isn’t at all. There is some anger directed towards one girl in general but not at all women yet. The cover of the album relates to Suicide Season and is about me opening up and talking about things that I’ve never shared with anyone and it’s more like me putting all my feelings into that album from the last few years of my life. The whole idea behind the cover is that the girl [on the cover] has her intestines out and it’s about spilling your guts basically, and opening up to the world. The cover art was my idea and that was the reasoning behind it.

Suicide Season seems to be a little more mature musically and it takes BMTH away from the deathcore genre affiliation. Was this intentional?
Yeha. This whole deathcore thing, I don’t really get it. We wrote that album, Count Your Blessings, and we’re into metal but we never really paid any attention to the whole genre thing and deathcore. Then Suicide Season came out and so many people were like, "Oh, what the fuck? This isn’t deathcore anymore.” We were like, "it’s not what-core?” We didn’t get it. To be honest, we couldn’t be more pleased to be getting away from that whole genre because, I’m not saying it’s not good music, it’s just such an overpopulated scene that’s killing itself. All these bands come out and they aren’t even playing music; they’re about trying to write the most technical songs. They’re just trying to write the most complex and intricate songs and they’ve lost sight of what music is all about. I don’t know, there’s something twisted to it. It should be catchy and stick in your head. Do you know what I mean?