TOP FIVE BRING ME THE HORIZON ALBUMS

With the release of Post Human: NeX GEn, we will in this Top Five consider the broad-spanning discography of the (post-?) metalcore giants Bring Me the Horizon, a band that’s in rare air being as relevant as ever over two decades into their career, continuously setting the pace for the scene. So where does BMTH’s latest stack up, and what are my thoughts on it? Read on to find out.

5. Sempiternal (2013)

There Is a Hell… (not quite a Fiona Apple-level mouthful of a title, but it’s getting there) and Count Your Blessings, although a great entry in its own right in the then-brand new deathcore genre, just miss the cut for me here.

Sempiternal is great and so many metalcore bands have been chasing this sound for the last decade. Is there a "but"? Not really—this band’s catalogue is that good. Sempiternal shows no one to this day has done this style of metalcore better. There are still plenty of heavy moments on here, but the band expanded their use of the electronic textures they’d been exploring over the previous two records and really leaned into a more melodic sound. I’ll always remember the BBC playing a single off this record back when I was living in Wales, I am pretty sure it was "Shadow Moses," and fielding a call right after from a woman saying something to the effect of "Yeah, never play that again." A little too abrasive for her, I suppose, although at the time for some fans of the band it wasn’t considered abrasive enough.

4. Amo (2019)

Speaking of melodic, after going all-in on the arena rock/hard rock album That’s the Spirit, myself and probably many others assumed they were going to stay in Octane world. What a curveball this record was, and it shows how versatile and unafraid to explore different sounds—and nail them—this band has been throughout their career, despite often getting backlash from a vocal minority of fans. Essentially each album up to and past this point if you consider Music to Listen to… was getting less heavy, which the band trolls on the excellent "Heavy Metal" on this album ("I'm afraid you don't love me anymore / 'Cause a kid on the 'gram in a Black Dahlia tank / Says it ain't heavy metal"), also teasing that they still have it at the end of that track. Incorporating numerous different influences but with the pop aspect most pronounced here, Amo contains some of the band’s best songs, such as the gorgeous love song "Mother Tongue" and pop rock anthems like "Sugar Honey Ice & Tea," "Medicine," and "MANTRA." This is the album that cemented their status as a truly visionary act that could transcend the metalcore scene, in many ways a modern version of The Clash.

3. Post Human: NeX GEn (2024)

This is really a tie with our next selection, and not just because they’re already explicitly-linked. It’s so rare to find a band this deep into their career still sounding this fresh and on top of their game. Many of the Post Human touchstones are present here, although the source material this time around looks more into emo especially and post-hardcore, as well as some hyperpop. The soaring "Top 10 Statues That Cried Blood" is one of the band’s best songs to date, a mental health 2024 "Tears Don’t Fall" with an S-tier chorus. "n/A" is another, its gallows humor underscored by the contrast with the core-ified sunny singalong Marcy’s Playground "Sex and Candy" meets Oasis. Sequencing that track with "LosT" (which I discuss here) is a stroke of genius. Other highlights include the Bieber-core of "Die4U," the full-Deftones of "Limousine" with Aurora, and the Deftones-meets-emo of the gorgeous, deeply personal yet anthemic "YOUtopia."

Whereas our next selection is more global and dystopian in orientation, this one is much more personal, though in many ways no less dark and apocalyptic. Having said that, there are also silver linings as frontman Oli Sykes sings at the beginning of "YOUtopia": "There's a place I wanna take you / But I’m not quite there myself yet / I'm getting better but there's still days / Where I wish that I was someone else." The record centers on all the ways pain can drive someone to escape themselves while simultaneously yearning for something better. In synching with not just "YOUtopia" but songs reaching into BMTH’s back catalogue like "MANTRA," I was reminded of this passage from David Hawkins, MD, PhD’s book Letting Go (this is a long excerpt but I think a necessary one for context not just with this particular song and record, but for the lyrical journey we’ve seen from Sykes over the last couple albums):

When upset, you go to a doctor or psychiatrist, an analyst, a social worker, or an astrologer. You take up religion, get philosophy, take the Erhard Seminars Training (est), tap yourself with EFT. You get your chakras balanced, try some reflexology, go for ear acupuncture, do iridology, get healed with lights and crystals. You meditate, chant a mantra, drink green tea, try the Pentecostals, breathe in fire, and speak in tongues. You get centered, learn NLP, try actualizations, work on visualizations, study psychology, join a Jungian group. You get Rolfed, try psychedelics, get a psychic reading, jog, jazzercise, have colonics, get into nutrition and aerobics, hang upside down, wear psychic jewelry. Get more insight, bio-feedback, Gestalt therapy. You see your homeopath, chiropractor, naturopath. You try kinesiology, discover your Enneagram type, get your meridians balanced, join a consciousness-raising group, take tranquilizers. You get some hormone shots, try cell salts, have your minerals balanced, pray, implore, and beseech. You learn astral projection. Become a vegetarian. Eat only cabbage. Try macrobiotics, go organic, eat no GMO. Meet up with Native American medicine men, do a sweat lodge. Try Chinese herbs, moxicombustion, shiatsu, acupressure, feng shui. You go to India. Find a new guru. Take off your clothes. Swim in the Ganges. Stare at the sun. Shave your head. Eat with your fingers, get really messy, shower in cold water. Sing tribal chants. Relive past lives. Try hypnotic regression. Scream a primal scream. Punch pillows. Get Feldenkraised. Join a marriage encounter group. Go to Unity. Write affirmations. Make a vision board. Get re-birthed. Cast the I Ching. Do the Tarot cards. Study Zen. Take more courses and workshops. Read lots of books. Do transactional analysis. Get yoga lessons. Get into the occult. Study magic. Work with a kahuna. Take a shamanic journey. Sit under a pyramid. Read Nostradamus. Prepare for the worst. Go on a retreat. Try fasting. Take amino acids. Get a negative ion generator. Join a mystery school. Learn a secret handshake. Try toning. Try color therapy. Try subliminal tapes. Take brain enzymes, antidepressants, flower remedies. Go to health spas. Cook with exotic ingredients. Look into strange fermented oddities from faraway places. Go to Tibet. Hunt up holy men. Hold hands in a circle and get high. Renounce sex and going to the movies. Wear some yellow robes. Join a cult. Try the endless varieties of psychotherapy. Take wonder drugs. Subscribe to lots of journals. Try the Pritikin diet. Eat just grapefruit. Get your palm read. Think New Age thought. Improve the ecology. Save the planet. Get an aura reading. Carry a crystal. Get a Hindu sidereal astrological interpretation. Visit a transmedium. Go for sex therapy. Try Tantric sex. Get blessed by Baba Somebody. Join an anonymous group. Travel to Lourdes. Soak in the hot springs. Join Arica. Wear therapeutic sandals. Get grounded. Get more prana and breathe out that stale black negativity. Try golden needle acupuncture. Check out snake gallbladders. Try chakra breathing. Get your aura cleaned. Meditate in Cheops, the great pyramid in Egypt. You and your friends have tried all of the above, you say? Oh, the human! You wonderful creature! Tragic, comic and yet so noble! Such courage to keep on searching! What drives us to keep looking for an answer? Suffering? Oh, yes. Hope? Certainly. But there is something more than that. Intuitively, we know that somewhere there is an ultimate answer. We stumble down dark byways into cul-de-sacs and blind alleys; we get exploited and taken, disillusioned, fed up, and we keep on trying. Where is our blind spot? Why can’t we find the answer?

What does Hawkins say? "We don’t understand the problem; that’s why we can’t find the answer…Maybe the solution is not 'out there,' and that’s why we can’t find it." As Dr. Fran Grace writes in that book’s Foreword: "We learn that the answer to the problems we face is within us…This is the universal message of every great teacher, sage, and saint: ‘The kingdom of heaven is within you.’ Dr. Hawkins says frequently, ‘What you are seeking is not different from your very own Self.’" Now consider this in light of "YOUtopia": "There is a home, somewhere / Beyond my bones / And I'm just too terrified / To dive inside / Soul like a cemetery / Hard to ignore, we're sick to the core / A world's been buried / Where love is the law, a youtopia… / There is a home / Beyond our bones / So connect to the Divine." The higher self, love—including crucially self-love—and even the Divine isn’t somewhere outside oneself, but rather buried underneath all that pain and hurt, there, on the inside.

Sykes’s struggles with addiction and mental health topically dominate the record: there is hope, but there’s also lots of pain and anguish, much more on the latter side of the balance sheet. "Dig It," the album’s closer, most explicitly straddles both Post Human albums, and if "YOUtopia" provides that sliver of hope, "Dig It" throws dirt on the grave: "'Cause the world is a scary place, scary future, scary fate / Thought the pain would teach me somehow / But the only thing I figured out is life is a grave." It’s an often-difficult record to listen to from that perspective, steeped as it is in references to addiction, suicide, trauma, death, and despair. I guess selfishly I would’ve preferred a different, more hopeful ending where they brought things full circle, but it’s not my art and it’s not my story.

2. Post Human: Survival Horror (2020)

Post Human: Survival Horror is technically an EP, but it’s really got all of the characteristics of a full-length, so I decided to cheat and include it, and for good reason: it’s one of the best albums, regardless of genre, to come out this decade. Another left turn from the band, as I mentioned above they appeared to be on a trajectory where the heaviness was just about totally in the rearview. Not here, as songs like "Kingslayer" (that breakdown, my goodness—pairing that and the savagery of Sykes’s vocals with the sweet-singing of Babymetal is a chef’s kiss moment) and "Dear Diary," evidence. With tall glasses of Linkin Park and Mick Gordon to go with the band’s consistent willingness to experiment, the results were and are exceptional. S-tier choruses proliferate, the project is a cohesive whole that synched with the fear the world was feeling at the height of COVID, and as usual the production was excellent. The band intelligently sourced their collaborations for this one to bring out the best in the material.

1. Suicide Season (2008)

Suicide Season is basically the scene ideal, its Michelangelo’s David. It’s Breakdown City, party metal for deathcore and scene kids. Just as they were some of the earliest practitioners of deathcore and afterward have remained a good two to three years ahead of the scene, they were already incorporating some of the kinds of electronic elements that are now a staple in metalcore here. The production is also insanely crisp. Hooks for days, great atmosphere, an all-time classic in "Chelsea Smile" (see if you can spot the Cancer Bats cameo in the video)…along with Architects’ Hollow Crown, this album set a new high bar during what was the best two-year stretch of heavy music in the "core" arena ever. That’s saying something.