Bring Me

the Horizon

HAVING SURVIVED ‘SUICIDE SEASON,’ THE
BRITISH BRUISERS PREFER KETCHUP TO BLOOD

WHEN ENGLISH DEATHCORE OUTFIT BRING ME THE HORIZON HIT the road for their late-’08 US tour, they wanted to experience the sort of Western adventure that seems so exotic to many a young Briton. So, upon tumbling into Tucson, Arizona—a Southwestern city known more for gem festivals and rodeos than screeched vocals and pummeling breakdowns—the group decided to take advantage of their geography…liter-ally. A friend loaned them some guns, and the moshpit marauders rode out to the desert to fire off a few rounds.

“I was useless,” says the band’s vocalist, Oliver Sykes, laughing. “I didn’t
hit anything, but our drummer [Matt Nichols] was actually pretty good at it.”

Sykes’ poor gun-slinging skills didn’t get him down, though, because in almost every other way, 2008 was a banner year for his band. The group’s second full-length, Suicide Season (Epitaph), debuted in Billboard’s Top 10 independent albums and, musically, it easily trumped their last album, 2006’s Count Your Blessings. “With Count Your Blessings we were still 18 and 17 years old, so I still think we had a way to go and progress,” says Sykes. Produced by Fredrik Nordström (Dimmu Borgir, At the Gates), Suicide Season is that next step for the band, a taut exercise in anger management, from its

open-heart confessional lyrics to its piston-precise rhythmic battery. Given the busy schedule that accompanies a breakthrough, Revolver got lucky and convinced Sykes to disarm long enough to discuss the album.

REVOLVER So, what’s up with the album title?

OLIVER SYKES I went through a lot of stuff right before the album was written; no one knows about it. It’s not something that I’d ever let get out. It’s something I had to deal with myself, and it almost destroyed the band…I don’t even think my band knew about it. I just kind of dealt with it. The album so easily could have not happened, and it could not have been written if I never had this kind of stuff to sing about and write about.

What was your musical influence then?
We wanted to do stuff that’s not necessarily what our genre of
music does. Everyone in the band is into different kinds of music, not
just metal. We kind of wanted to show that and bring it into what we do.
I don’t think we knew how we were gonna do it. It ended up being stuff