Bring Me The Horizon burst back on killer EP, with help from YUNGBLUD, BABYMETAL and Amy Lee…
It is 14 years to the day that Bring Me The Horizon released their Count Your Blessings debut album. You can look at the dash between these two dates and get lost in the highs, the successes, the personal traumas and whatever else, but you can almost boil everything down to one irrefutable point: Bring Me The Horizon have never stopped growing. They have also never stopped learning, or taking things in from their surroundings where they’re at right now. Oli Sykes once told this writer that, creatively, there’s more of an attitude of ‘Why not?’ than ‘Why?’.
They also know when to roll out a surprise. Thus, when this EP’s opener Dear Diary kicks off with a riff that could have tumbled out of Suicide Season, something some had thought was behind the band after amo and That’s The Spirit, it’s an almost hilarious gotcha moment. Then Lee Malia peels off a Slayer-esque solo. Ah yes, the other thing Bring Me The Horizon are going at doing is this: whatever the hell they like.
Made largely in lockdown – and with a title that may or may not echo the words of Professor Falken in ‘80s Cold War movie WarGames, that it’s “much more fortunate” to suffer “a millisecond of brilliant light” from a nuclear strike than “wander sightless through the smouldering aftermath”, hence living next to a nuclear target to be “spared the horror of survival” – there are many things here that could point to a feeling of doom. ‘God is a shithead and we’re his rejects’ yells Oli during Dear Diary, while on Teardrops he says that, ‘Everything is so fucked up but I can’t feel a thing’. Parasite Eve, released just as corona really took hold, frustratedly ponders, ‘When we forget the infection, will we remember the lesson?’. About all this or not, it adds to a feeling first of frustration and struggle, but for all such thing, the thrill here is of trying to dance in the rain. Are we fucked? Maybe, so let’s dance.
They’ve got some mates in to help them. You already know Obey, with its giant-robots video and guest spot from YUNGBLUD, but there’s also Kingslayer, in which BABYMETAL turn up for a futuristic metal assault, the nu-metally 1x1 with Nova Twins, and, perhaps most surprising, Evanescence’s Amy Lee on the snappily-named One Day The Only Butterflies Left Will Be In Your Chest As You March Towards Your Death. All are their own thing, all are perfectly in-tune with their guests, but mostly, all sound naturally BMTH 2020.
After amo, the most obvious surprise here is how heavy Post Human: Survival Horror is. But that’s just one thing here. BMTH have long known how to play what cards when, and just when we need something cathartic, something heavy, something with an element of the familiar in amongst the creativity, they deliver richly here. Fourteen years on from their debut, much has changed, but in some other ways some things are exactly the same. Know this: you’ll never have Bring Me The Horizon truly figured out. Good.
Verdict: 4/5
For Fans Of: BABYMETAL, Architects, Slipknot
Post Human: Survival Horror is out now via RCA.
