RCA / Sony
The people on the bus with me when I first listened to Bring Me The Horizon‘s latest album certainly got to enjoy an array of various facial expressions and reactions. I walked into Amo without too many expectations, or so I tried to tell myself.
Bring Me The Horizon have been a staple of my music taste since I was about thirteen, just before they released That’s The Spirit, which was the beginning of their transition away from the angsty teenage metal that they were known and loved for. Around Sempiternal (2013), they started to grow up, and over the next five years their image, music and fan base has grown and changed, now giving us their sixth studio album. Amo paints a musical image of the world we live in, encompassing the internet, hate, relationships both personal and professional, fans, fame, grief, loss, endings and love.
The album fades in with “I Apologise If You Feel Something”, a track composed of submarine-esque sounds bouncing off distorted vocals, an uncharacteristic sound for Bring Me The Horizon, but the barely comprehensible lyrics come across as a bit of a disclaimer for what’s to follow. When they released the first single “Mantra”, some fans were reassured by its similarity to the kind of “stadium grindcore” that we’ve grown used to, but I had an idea that that wasn’t all the album was going to be. I remembered a while back reading somewhere that this album was going to have more of a “dance feel” or something along those lines, and with a bit of fun in an almost interactive way, with a direct address to the listener. The refrain of “Mantra” is inserted into the lyrics as if it were on a shopping channel, an idea pushed on the song’s music video. In an interview not long after “Mantra”’s début, frontman Oliver Sykes said that it was very different from all the other tracks. On both Sempiternal and That’s The Spirit, the first singles were the heavier songs from each album, seemingly a tactic to ease the hardcore fans into less hell-bent metal tracks on the rest of the LP. “Mantra” is no different, making a good transition into Amo. I was glad of any new music from Bring Me The Horizon after nearly four years, and I have a certain affection for the song and its political commentary on our cult-like society, but I must admit I wasn’t blown away. That moment came for me with the release of “Wonderful Life”, which features Dani Filth.This was the track that reminded me — OMGLOOKBMTHISRELEASINGNEWMSICASDFGHJKL! — that yeah, this is what I came for; but not the only thing I stayed for. The nihilistic lyrics and sarcasm right from the title resembles Bring Me The Horizon in every way, but this track is where you can start to see them grow up. There’s a certain irony and more playfulness in the songs, almost like a more positive spin in the negative subjects they’ve always covered.
The lyric video is in complete opposition to the song too, a series of banal clips of everyday life on a loop and insistently long, a bit like the sweeping scene in the third season of Twin Peaks, interjected with the weird demonic figure of Dani Filth going about his daily life in black metal corpse paint; which just goes to show that even the most hardcore and twisted among us still gotta go shopping. On the other hand, “Mantra”’s video is a flurry of visuals of just bizarre television adverts and Oli Sykes’s cult of which he is the guru. The imagery is fast and heavily edited, with a lot of information to take in at once, contrasting with “Wonderful Life”’s slow banality. Between the two features is “Nihilist Blues”, a title that gave me hope for a bit of an emocore anthem, but I was surprised by a distorted trance-like track that really could be in a club or just, y’know, somewhere with strobe lights in a dark room, which is the vision the bass- and synth-heavy track gives me. At first I wasn’t too enthused by the song, but it’s grown on me a bit since, despite the uncharacteristic sound that shows that while Bring Me The Horizon is branching out, the pessimism and (obviously) nihilism is still going strong.This track mixes guitar into synth, making it a gateway from pop to alternative that’ll lead new fans into the depths of core music from Bring Me The Horizon’s past. It represents their evolution over fifteen years to a certain extent — as does the entire album — but this particular track really show the blurring of lines for Bring Me The Horizon. Many bands have experimented with genre, but this is definitely the way to go about it, even if it leaves some sceptical or closed to it. Amo has its charm that isn’t failing to win over long time fans. It’s a risk, but it should pay off.
“In The Dark” follows in the same kind of feel, but with more comprehensible words and even more of a catchy pop vocal style, structured more like a song than a trance-y, dance-y track. Somehow, the lyrics and their seeming randomness reminds me a bit of Kurt Cobain’s iconic word vomit. The third single to be released is “Medicine”, a pop ballad of revenge, which we’ll get into in a sec. The music video is just a bit bizarre, a pink and black CGI world of distortion that I can’t quite make head nor tail of quite yet.I was sceptical at first and put off by the poppy sound of this track, somewhere between Troye Sivan and Linkin Park. But then I figured that’s not such a bad thing, and it worked itself into my brain, as pop is meant to do. The synths are still backed by drums and even though Oli’s vocals are almost all completely clean and more Coachella than Hellfest, the things they sing about still have that Bring Me The Horizon pessimism and foundation in anger. I do have to take this song with a grain of salt, knowing who it is about, and admiring that person a lot.
It is in no way like Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next”, a song of gratitude dedicated (but above it all now an anthem) to exes, but a work of revenge for the over-exposed and publicised break-up between Oli and his ex-wife in 2016. This song really puts forward the way she made a bit of a spectacle of it all against Oli’s desires (although there’s been much worse). So this track has turned to revenge and, as is clearly stated, giving her a taste of her own medicine in the form of public exposure. Oli uses the power of music and the platform it’s given him to put out a message, as is done several times throughout this record. “Medicine” has a sort of introduction in shape of the preceding track, “Ouch”, with fast-paced drums, mechanical music and distorted vocals. It practically made me jump out of my skin with the introductory line “Tu as tué mon bébé”. I was expecting Portuguese somewhere in the record, but the French threw me off and I still am not quite sure what to take from it. The rest of the track is very short, with instantly recognisable references to “Follow You” from That’s The Spirit, introducing the subject of Oli’s broken marriage.That’s The Spirit caused a bit of an uprising from long-time fans, scandalised by the popiness of the album, saying they were sell-outs and scorning the album. It played to Bring Me The Horizon’s favour however, with plenty of fans remaining and bringing in enough new ones to start breaking into the mainstream, playing Glastonbury in 2016 and selling out the 02 Arena in London twice. They weren’t fazed by those pissed-off metal fans whose internet hate for Bring Me The Horizon hasn’t ceased and has doubled up with the releases of “Medicine” and “Mother Tongue”. What they’re probably not expecting is Bring Me The Horizon’s retaliation later in the album via “Why You Gotta Kick Me When I’m Down” and “Heavy Metal.”
The former is a bit of an attack, but demonstrates Bring Me The Horizon’s musical, personal and emotional growth. The music shows strong influences from Twenty One Pilots with a bit of a trash rap and a Yungblud vibe in there too. A resemblance to Twenty One Pilots is something I’m seeing from a few artists, including the previously mentioned Yungblud on his track “Psychotic Kids”, with the mix of styles into a new kind of pop-synth-heavy-on-drums-and-bass-kinda-rap-knick-knack-paddy-whack. I’m also starting to notice that this kinda feel is happening whenever an artist starts saying they’re mixing genres and defying labels; maybe they’re just collectively revolving around Twenty One Pilots and they, including Bring Me The Horizon, are making a new kind of 2010s alternative pop together.The lyrics on this track retaliate against the internet attacks and clearly state that if they’re writing metal songs, then Oli’s doing badly. So if they want metal, they want Oli to be hurt and broken, as that’s where it comes from. After That’s The Spirit, Oli seemed rather fragile after a few drug-related low points and the end of his marriage a year later, so the hate was what not was needed; hence the title exhibiting that this time he can and will retaliate.
“Heavy Metal” comes from a bit of a different angle, the added exposure of the music industry pushing them and their confusion at being between genres in a world that lives on labels, and the industrialisation of it all: “I woke up in a warehouse, but the label had fell off”. There’s also a bit of insecurity in the line “I’m afraid you don’t love me anymore”, as if they worry that the fans won’t support them any longer, and about the “kids on the gram” who are growing away from Bring Me The Horizon as they play around with pop and synths. Again, the instrumental in the middle is quite like Twenty One Pilots in their Blurryface era with the underlying bass and feel to it. The song is not without Oli’s classic passive aggression, with the end breaking into the slow rolling beats of the 2000s Suicide Silence grind that Bring Me The Horizon used to resemble, and the tiniest little taste of the beloved screamo /deathcore growls that many fans miss. Those growls also fester briefly on “Sugar”, a song that leans more towards their old sound too. Bring Me The Horizon aren’t known for their love songs, with “Follow You” notably being dubbed by some as their “most hated song”, and their mentions of love, even relating to Oli’s previous marriage, tend towards negative connotations; but now the pro-metal fans are not overwhelmed by “Mother Tongue”. This is where the Portuguese actually shows itself, and this is a love song that isn’t actually even as negative as any previous mentions of the subject. It puts forward a description of love being intangible, embodied by the wordless “whoa oh oh”, and replacing singing with a short spoken-word segment where Oli attempts to describe the emotion.One theme that isn’t unknown to Bring Me The Horizon’s longtime fans is grief, with songs like “Suicide Season” and “Don’t Go”. Grief is featured again in “I Don’t Know What To Say”, a song about Oli’s friend who passed away from cancer. It shows the simple incomprehension of loss and the void that is left. Death is common in Bring Me The Horizon’s songs, but often in more of an angsty teen way, and the twisted obsession with mortality that comes with adolescence. This track jumps out a bit from the others with its rapid violins, not dissimilar to the introduction of “Don’t Go”, although those were slower.
This song is a more mature vision of grief, it seems, previous ones being more despairing and painful, an agonising questioning of “why?” This still has those qualities, but with a bit more removal, a loss of words over the unjust departure of a friend, and Oli seems to want to defend him after he’s gone. Rather than a raw expression of pain, it comes across as more of a tribute, a goodbye expressed just as much in the music as in the lyrics. There’s nostalgia as well, laced to that persistent hope of rest and peace for lost ones. I have to admit, I do miss Oli’s screams and I’m glad to hear the growls again, however briefly, in a few tracks, but the album itself contains such a plethora of sounds and genres, showing Bring Me The Horizon’s growth from a little metalcore band into an international alternative powerhouse storming the planet. They have evolved, and lost and gained fans along the way, including myself, but they have what it takes and know how to use it, that musical charisma that translates into their concert magic onstage that make them one of my favourite acts to have had the pleasure to have seen live.Their music grows with time and their life experiences, but never loses the roots it came from, and even if they don’t like that music any more, they respect it. It’s been a complex journey out of the Steel City, but those who’ve let go of the band because Bring Me The Horizon have changed, for the good and their own benefit, don’t get it. They captivate and enlace themselves into not just your music library, but your life, posters plastered over my walls. Even my friends know them because they have worked their way into being a part of me, one of the four “essential” bands that have shaped my teenage years, and I hope will stay with me my whole life.
However mainstream they may become, young fans will always identify with the nihilist, guttural anger at an unjust world in Bring Me The Horizon’s music, and grow with them into a more adult vision and expression of a wider range of sentiments. Lee Malia, Matt Kean, Jordan Fish, Matt Nicholls, Oli Sykes; thank you.-Frankie Harmonia-
