I used to think Bring Me the Horizon were a pretty shitty band. I did dig the song “Pray for Plagues”, but I thought the rest of the album it hailed from was repetitive, breakdown-filled deathcore. I had some more contact with their later releases after that, but for me they slowly got lumped into that “scene bands teenage girls” like category, and I just couldn’t take them seriously.
Then, last year, I heard they were working with Terry Date (Deftones, Soundgarden, Incubus, The Fall of Troy), one of my favorite producers, and I just couldn’t help but give them one more shot. What I found was Sempiternal, an album which found the band miles away from their deathcore roots, instead writing lush, textured, melodic songs with genuinely emotional vocals. And now they’re gearing up to release the follow-up to that album, That’s The Spirit, due out on September 11th. Part of that process is this new song and video, “Throne”.
Like the album’s first single, “Happy Song”, “Throne” finds the band picking up where Sempiternal left off. They’ve retained the dense, layered keyboard and guitar sound they had on that album, and “Throne” in particular shows off the band’s new found penchant for electronics. It’s a surging, bubbling, and exciting track, even if it does breathe a tad too much of the same air Linkin Park has in recent years. But the biggest change on this song is Oli Syke’s vocals. On Sempiternal he was still trying to find his clean voice, often times still sticking in the middle ground between screamed and sung registers. But “Throne” shows that Oli can now be considered a legitimate singer, as the first few seconds show a side of him fans have never heard before. And now he can go back and forth between raspy singing and shouting, whispered coos, and screams as the songs call for it, giving the band a whole new dimension.
Bring Me the Horizon have been catching tons of shit for this new sound of theirs, but I honestly can’t help but applaud them for it. They’ve gone from writing pretty run-of-the-mill deathcore to growing as songwriters, trying new sounds and textures and moods. Yeah, they sound pretty poppy at times, but at heart I’ve always been a sucker for a good song. And coming from such a heavy background, it’s poppy music that’s informed by heavy music, giving it a different feel entirely. I can’t help but compare the leap to In Flames’ album Reroute to Remain, where they famously shifted their sound from classic melodic death metal into something more modern and loose. This is how bands stay relevant and interesting – they take leaps, and sometimes the fans hate them, but it keeps the actual humans in the band that make the music stay happy and inspired. And happy and inspired musicians end up creating inspired music, so even if they’ve switched genres, the music they’re making is probably still damn good. You just gotta give it a chance.
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