Getting It Right

It's all finally come together for Bring Me The Horizon, the British metalcore band that unwittingly became martyrs of the genre in the late-noughties. After a massive northern hemisphere festival season that saw them play in all corners of America and Europe, proof of their current standing was seen no better than during the Sheffield group's afternoon set at Reading Festival this year. On that same main stage in 2008, the band were pelted with objects after replacing Slipknot. This year, they commanded one of the festival's biggest pits and had punters screaming every word back at them.

“It's nuts man, it's one of them things where you just look back at where we were a couple of years before that, we were just getting bottled – a tremendous amount of shit was thrown at us,” Oli Sykes recalls with a laugh. “And in a couple of years to turn it around and have that many people going nuts to us, I dunno, it's pretty funny in a way.”

Not that Bring Me The Horizon had any indication they'd written the album of their career when they put Sempiternal, their fourth full-length, together last year. Consumed in the process, Sykes admits the band didn't even think about how people were going to react to a record that would become their second straight number one in this country and go on to be the group's highest charting release in the US, UK and Europe.

“My thought was we need to push ourselves and see what we could do as musicians more than just push what we could do with different sounds, which I think is what we worked for on our last two albums,” he says. “It's why I decided that I wanted to bring a bit more melody into my voice; that was something I'd never done before. I'd never tried to sing before and I was fucking awful at it, and I'm still learning now – I have to work on it every day – but we'd been a band ten years, I think it was time.

“There's only so much you can say with just screaming,” he continues. “I wanted to display more emotion and get what I'm saying out there better, for it to stay with more people more often because you can write the best lyric in the world but if it's not got any melody behind it it's not going to stick in anyone's head or it's not going to make anyone think about it. So I wanted to try and achieve that with this album, and also with Jordan [Fish – keys/programming] coming into it, he really opened the doors for what we've always wanted to do but never had the expertise to do it, so in a way it's the album we've always wanted to write but never had the ability to in the past.”

With Fish and touring guitarist Brendan MacDonald in the ranks, Sykes gushes that the chemistry and energy in the band has never been better. “It's like we're six completely different people and it works for that reason I think. It feels like a real team where it hasn't done in the past; no one's got any hidden agendas or no one's got any other goals apart from touring and being in this band, and that's how it should be.”

The statement seems to indirectly reference this year's falling out that Bring Me The Horizon had with former Aussie guitarist Jona Weinhofen of I Killed The Prom Queen. Sykes draws out an audible pause before giving a straight “no” when asked if he'd been in contact recently with Weinhofen, however, the frontman's polite and relaxed nature during our interview suggests that, in their minds, the drama has passed. Bring Me The Horizon have leant how to cope when presented with such hurdles; it's what they've been doing for years.

“No one in the world is a 'rock star'; no one's that guy that's portrayed on the front cover of magazines being photoshopped,” Sykes states. “People make their own mind up about you and a lot of the time it's not true. I spent a lot of time [in the past] trying to prove people wrong and also trying to live up to the person that people thought I was, but at the end of the day I was neither of those people and I turned myself a bit insane with that and so I didn't really want to be me anymore if that makes sense. But it's just accepting who you are isn't it, not letting other people's perceptions of you warp yourself. Once you've figured out that [being in a band is] a piece of piss, you couldn't have any more fun in the world.”