Kingpins of modern British rock, Bring Me The Horizon‘s success is a tale of perseverance and redemption, while their evolution from scrappy, deathcore-peddling teens to the boundary-smashing behemoths they are today is integral to the wider success of modern British metal.
With the follow-up to mainstream breakthrough LP ‘That’s The Spirit’ fast-approaching, all eyes are on their next moves – below, we unpick everything we know about the record that’s sure to cement BMTH’s position as arena-fillers.
Latest news:
- ‘Amo’ is now set for release on January 25, 2019
- Tracklist unveiled
- The new album will feature a collaboration with Grimes
- New track ‘wonderful life’ released
When will the new Bring Me The Horizon album be released?
Despite an original release date set for January 11, Bring Me The Horizon have now said that ‘Amo’ will drop on January 25, 2019. You can pre-order it here.
The update also included the album’s tracklist – check it out below.
jan 25https://t.co/ovXYsAQhVq pic.twitter.com/1KZayWAL6K
— Bring Me The Horizon (@bmthofficial) October 21, 2018
What does ‘Amo’ mean?
As well as being the Portuguese word for love, frontman Oli Sykes revealed the deeper levels of meaning behind the name choice in an NME interview.
“Obviously ‘Amo’ is Portuguese for ‘I love’,” he explained, “[but] obviously there’s the ‘ammunition’ part and then in European Portuguese it means ‘master’. It sounds happy, but there are all these hidden meanings that make it more complex.”
When can we hear new music?
BMTH released the second single from ‘Amo’ on October 21. It’s called ‘wonderful life’ and features Cradle of Filth’s Dani Filth. Check out the official lyric video below.
Lead single ‘Mantra’ was premiered on Annie Mac’s BBC Radio show on August 21. The track features the lyrics “Do you wanna start a cult with me?”, which previously appeared on the billboard used to tease the band’s return.
Read the full NME verdict on ‘Mantra’ here.
What’s all this about ‘Mantra’?
A billboard featuring iconography previously used by the band appeared in Central London recently appeared in London. Thought to be the start of a teaser campaign for new BMTH material, it features a website which promises “Salvation will return” on August 21 – the date that new single ‘Mantra’ was released.
Bring Me The Horizon things are happening ? pic.twitter.com/xuLT7C5Uk0
— Connor (@ConnorM_Photo) August 10, 2018
“Do you wanna start a cult with me?” it also reads – a lyric that later popped up on ‘Mantra’. It appeared alongside a phone number that connects callers to a woman called Samantha, who hurriedly tells you: “They’re making me do this. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”
After a distorted clip of music plays, the line goes dead. Fans slowed down the clip, which you can hear below – it later proved to be the opening verse to ‘Mantra’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8ywnnCF2_o
As touched on above, a website, Joinmantra.org,– also offers “an invitation to salvation” and says “man can save his soul.”
The site reads: “There are those who will say that only after a lifetime of sacrifice and good doing can the soul be free – that God demands conditions in the freedom and that some have the power of making mankind slaves.”
Mantra appears to be the name of a mysterious cult or organisation – a core theme on the album.
What subjects will ‘Amo’ tackle?
The aforementioned ‘cult’ theme was expanded upon by Oli Sykes in a Metal Hammer interview. “’Mantra’ started off when I was watching this documentary called Wild Wild Country,” he explains. “I was watching all these people devoted to this one guy, doing this crazy shit for him. As I was watching it and trying to write lyrics at the same time, I was drawing these similarities to cults and love.”
“Starting a relationship – especially a marriage – is like starting a cult,” adds Oli, “a small two-man cult, because you have to give yourself over completely to this person, you have to trust them, you have to love them unconditionally even if you start thinking ‘This is a bit suspect’ or ‘This is a bit dodgy’. That’s what a relationship is, it’s exactly the same as a cult so that’s where the thinking behind the song came from.”
Speaking of the lyrical inspiration behind the album, Sykes also told NME that he used the songs as catharsis following a recent divorce – drawing all of the extremes between ‘gushing about being in love’ to ‘the darkest parts of a relationship’.
“I went through a divorce a couple of years ago and I really didn’t want to talk about,” Sykes admitted. “I don’t want it to seem like I care, and I didn’t want to dredge up the past. I didn’t want to give the person the ‘glory’ of writing stuff about them and shit like that. After it while it just became apparent that I needed to. I needed to get it out of my system.
“It wasn’t the fact that I was miserable, I was fine. At the same time when you go through something traumatic, you carry a lot of stuff with you after it. There’s a lot of mental baggage. Whatever happened in that situation, I took that on. Maybe I started trusting people less, and it’s completely irrational – but you do. I’ve always said it, but writing music and lyrics is the most therapeutic thing. I’m really lucky in that sense, because it’s the best way to get stuff out, you know? To write about it and sing it on stage.”
What will ‘Amo’ sound like?
‘Mantra’ sees Oli Sykes continue his run of clean singing, with the heavier screams of Bring Me The Horizon’s past material seemingly left behind for good. It also bolsters the electronic elements of newest member Jordan Fish, refining the pop-rock sound of ‘That’s The Spirit’. Read the full NME review of ‘Mantra’ here.
Speaking to NME, however, Sykes indicated that ‘Mantra’ will not be representative of the album as a whole. “‘Mantra’ came a bit later,” he says of the writing process. “We wrote a lot of cool stuff but we were kind of scared, like ‘What are we gonna show people first?’ We’re really proud of everything we’ve done, but how are we not going to completely alienate everybody when we show them this record?”
He continued: “I actually had a little bit of a meltdown about it and then we ended up writing this song [‘Mantra’]. It just felt right. It’s just different enough. It’s not safe, but it’s a bit of what you know and love about us while pushing it out there. It’s not that it’s not representative, but every song on the record is completely different. It’s a lot more experimental than our last record.”
Sykes also told Metal Hammer that around the time of the record’s writing, he was listening to “some old dance stuff like Snap, old ‘Creamfields records, or ‘Bonkers’/old happy hardcore shit in places.”
He added: “For ‘Mantra’ we wanted to make a poppy Pantera song mixed with Tame Impala or Radiohead; we’re trying to do what we’ve done in the past where it could sit on the radio, but some songs sound like dance songs. Obviously they don’t, but the influences are a lot stronger than we’ve ever dared before.”
In an August 22 interview with Kerrang! magazine, Sykes said, “Without any disrespect to the last album, when you put these songs up against the old ones, every song just smashes the old ones out of the park”, while the other members of the band describe the music as “varied”, “free”, “weird” and “mental”.
There’s also a hint at upcoming collaborations from the band, with the Kerrang! piece stating a “female artist from a different genre” is set to feature, as well as an artist described by Jordan Fish as “completely random”. The latter appears to point towards a rumoured collaboration between BMTH and Post Malone, though that is unconfirmed.
In 2016, Oli Sykes told NME that their new album is set to be ‘weirder and darker’. “Sometimes we talk about it, but it’s ‘in the moment’ when you’re inspired by something and I don’t know,” he said. “I think there’s an element of what we’re doing now that will stay in the music, but at the same time it’s like people thought ‘That’s The Spirit’ was a very polished pop rock album – it’s not. I think it’s inventive and unique, but it’s still safe in a way; we knew the songs we’re gonna connect well with people. Next time I think we wanna push it a bit weirder. Who knows?”
When asked if their new material might take a more dance-oriented edge, Sykes replied: “Potentially, yeah. That’s my favourite part – it’s something we do that comes across really well live you know when the song to us has a breakdown or like a heavy dance kind of vibe to it. You know there’s not many acts like that. If there was some bridge between what we’re doing, somewhere between artists like Prodigy or Massive Attack and stuff like that.”
Back in 2017, keyboardist/singer Jordan Fish spoke to the Radio 1 Rock Show, confirming that it “won’t be a pop record”.
“There are a few things I know it won’t be. It’s not going to be a pop record,” said Fish. “I don’t think we’d ever do a straight, boring pop record. It’s not going to be a super, super heavy record either … We’ll probably take bits from what we did on ‘Sempiternal’, bits from what we did on ‘That’s The Spirit’ and take it off in a different direction. As long as it’s interesting and exciting, that’s all I really care about.”
He added: “I understand there’s probably a load of people who want us to be super heavy and a load of people who only like the last album, who don’t like the heavier stuff. That’s just the nature of a band that’s changed styles so much across the course of their career. For us, I just want to write something good. Where it sits genre-wise is something someone else can worry about.”
Are Bring Me The Horizon and Post Malone collaborating?
A collaboration between Post Malone and Bring Me The Horizon has been long rumoured, after frontman Oli Sykes posted a slightly cryptic picture from the studio, which seemingly hinted that Post may be joining them. Or possibly just playing GTA: Online.
The rumours started up again after Bring Me The Horizon’s surprise appearance at Reading & Leeds 2018. A tweet quickly went viral after the appearance, which stated: “I don’t want to see none of y’all normies start listening to BMTH just because they’re collabing with Post Malone. “Y’all just wanna hop on the ’emo’ wave now because your favorite artists normalize it.”
Adding fuel to the fire, Sykes posted a photo of himself and Post hanging out together after their respective Reading & Leeds performances (below).
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bm9A_ZPhA4S/?hl=en&taken-by=olobersykes
Will Bring Me The Horizon tour in 2018?
Bring Me The Horizon announced a tour of the UK, Europe and Australia titled ‘First Love’, alongside the album details for ‘Amo’. Check out the full dates for the European run below. Tickets go on sale on August 31.
EU TOUR – NOVEMBER 2018
5 – Schleyer-halle, Stuttgart
6 – Sporthalle, Hamburg
8 – Ufo Im Velodrome, Berlin
9 – Messe, Chemnitz
10 – Stadthalle, Vienna
12 – Samsung Hall, Zurich
13 – Forum, Milan
14 – Zenith, Munich
16 – Lotto, Antwerp
17 – Jahrhunderthalle, Frankfurt
18 – Mitsubishi Electric Hall, Dusseldorf
20 – AFAS Live , Amsterdam
21 – Le Zenith, Paris
23 – Birmingham Arena, Birmingham
24 – First Direct Arena, Leeds
25 – SSE Hydro, Glasgow
27 – Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff
29 – Alexandra Palace, London
30 – Alexandra Palace, London