“I didn’t know how my year was going to look,” Jordan Fish admits. It’s a bitterly cold December morning, and the former Bring Me The Horizon keyboardist has joined NME for coffee in his Berkshire hometown of Newbury to reflect on an incredible – and perhaps unexpectedly busy – 2024. Slightly jetlagged from a recent trip to Los Angeles, he opts for an oat latte. “It’s kind of a career change, really… there’s a whole different bunch of skills you have to learn.”
The career change Fish describes is his transition into one of the most in-demand producers in the rock and metal world since he parted ways with Bring Me a year ago. In April, he told NME he’d completed four records, which we now know include Poppy’s scintillating sixth album ‘Negative Spaces’ and the forthcoming record from Brighton metalcore giants Architects, ‘The Sky, The Earth & All Between’.
In June, Busted revealed they’d tapped him up, too. An image in the studio with Spiritbox and another in the Californian desert with Bad Omens’ Noah Sebastian both sent shockwaves of anticipation and speculation through heavy music fans. Today, he teases heaps of additional projects he can’t yet talk about, including the next album from a “legacy pop-punk” act.
So far, though, ‘Negative Spaces’ is the only full-length album Fish has produced that has been released. “Poppy wanted to do big rock songs, which I can do, I guess,” he grins. “She started off doing this erratic, genre-shifty music… it’s not really my expertise to constantly change tempo. In my mind, she hadn’t really put together a body of work that felt super coherent, so that was the challenge – putting her lyrics and flavour over more conventional song structures. It was a painless process [because] she’s not particularly stressed about what she’s making.”
The result was Poppy’s heaviest album to date. But Fish plays down any influence on her devastating screams on ‘The Center’s Falling Out’, whose riff was written by House Of Protection member and Fish collaborator Stephen Harrison. “Her scream is so cutting and aggressive, it almost makes you feel sick. It’s a horror scream, like someone’s being murdered. It’s so piercing that I couldn’t be in the room!”
Reflecting on Fish’s time in BMTH, frontman Oli Sykes told NME he didn’t “think [he]’d be able to sing” without his former bandmate. Architects recently heaped similar praise on Fish’s ability to level up vocals, and his work with House Of Protection was the first time Harrison or bandmate Aric Improta had ever taken on vocal duties. “I’m not a singing teacher – I’m not even a great singer!” the producer jokes when asked about the secrets behind unlocking someone’s vocal ability.
“Some people need a bit of a confidence boost, to be really gently lifted up,” he explains. “Some people can be pushed harder. If they’re naturally good singers, you don’t need to tread carefully. I’ve also had sessions this year where vocalists really know what they want to do. I’m not going to necessarily step in and say, ‘Hey, the melody should go here,’ because they’re trying to find their own vibes. That’s one where you sit back.
“Sam [Carter] is someone who I would push,” he continues, voicing his infatuation with the Architects frontman’s “incredible” melodic clean vocals. “That’s a relationship that could end up with him storming out of the room once every 10 days! We really levelled him up on the record. It goes all over – it has a lot more depth than the singles they’ve put out.”
“It’s quite a vulnerable thing, making music with someone who you don’t really know”
Fish has forged a tight-knit friendship with Architects, first working with them on their massive 2017 single ‘Doomsday’. But it was his work on their forthcoming 11th album that exposed Fish to the highly charged reactions that often greet a fresh Architects release.
“They’re a strange band because they’re very divisive with metal purists,” he reflects. “Metalcore is a hot-headed community. People love to have opinions. To me, the main aim with the album was to feel exciting and aggressive – I wasn’t necessarily bothered about sounding how they used to sound 10 years ago. It’s just not the way to go… chasing an [old] sound.
“It’s the same with Bring Me, it didn’t really feel like we could go back after ‘Sempiternal’. I’m not saying it was the most ground-breaking record ever, but [afterwards] there were a lot of bands doing similar [music]. For us to carry on doing that would have felt like we were in that chasing pack – it’s not a nice feeling.”
As their keyboardist, Fish is often credited with changing BMTH’s sound from 2012 onwards, when they began in earnest their world-beating incorporation of electronics. Producing all of their post-‘Sempiternal’ output in tandem with Sykes (who called Fish his “right-hand man”), their work as an inseparable duo arguably shaped the style we associate with Fish today. It’s a distinctive sonic signature – often comprising stadium-sized chorus hooks, unpredictable riffs and beefy layers of synths – and has received some criticism online for supposedly diluting the scene with the same sounds.
“To me, [my projects] all sound so different… there’s maybe production choices that tie things together,” Fish says. “I don’t really hear my production sound, or my sound across the Bring Me records. It’s like how you never hear the sound of your own voice in your head.
“I’ve worked on a pop album for a Dutch artist [S10] – would people think that sounds like me? I don’t know. With Bring Me, I was just a cog in the machine. Oli was a producer, running the whole thing; Lee [Malia, guitarist] has got his own style; Matt [Nicholls, drummer] has got his own style… so that was not ‘my’ sound. It’s always a combination of whoever you’re working with.”
“I’m emotionally invested in every project and the artist’s career – I want to see them win”
Fish speaks fondly of BMTH’s ‘Post Human: Nex Gen’, on which he has seven songwriting credits. “I love the record. I love what they’re doing, and I still think the band is amazing.” Though he hasn’t seen Sykes this year (“It’s healthy… when you go your separate ways, you need time”), Fish only lives around the corner from Reading Festival, which BMTH will headline in August. Will he be heading down? “If I’m around, yeah, 100 per cent.”
Though he’s mainly spread his wings within the rock and metal world so far, genre doesn’t restrict Fish’s imagination, who is open to “have a crack at anything” – although he does rule out “straight pop” endeavours. “I do get nervous and self-conscious during the beginning [of projects],” he admits. “Socially, it’s a bit terrifying. It’s quite a vulnerable thing, making music with someone who you don’t really know. I have to remind myself to keep one foot in front of the other and be brave.”
Fish has stepped away from touring life – it’s a “different pace [which] suits me better” – but is still inundated with projects going into 2025. He does not appear on Spiritbox’s upcoming album ‘Tsunami Sea’, joking about how that studio photo has “been following me around” all year. (“We just did one day. I was already in the middle of two projects… I would love to work with them one day if the timing is right.”) As for the recent pic with his “really good friend” Noah Sebastian, Fish doesn’t confirm or deny any involvement in new Bad Omens music – though he has heard a few demos. “It’s gonna be sick. I’m excited for them.”
Fish’s inherent, constant desire to make art is exactly how Sykes described it to NME (“Jordan just wanted to write and create”). “I’m a little bit of a workaholic,” he laughs. “But I don’t see it as work – it doesn’t feel unhealthy.” This undying passion has been in his DNA since a young age, long before BMTH came along – “even when no one cared.”
It’s that relentless work ethic that makes Jordan Fish the producer feel like an unstoppable force (especially when in frequent collaboration with Zakk Cervini, the mixing and mastering engineer who Fish says is “family to me”). Is it time to float the title ‘super-producer’? Might Fish become to the rock and metal world what Rick Rubin, Pharrell Williams and Jack Antonoff have been to pop and hip-hop? Antonoff, too, has been criticised for the supposedly homogenising effects of his production.
“I’m not one of those – I’m just a lowly producer!” Fish replies, with an air of humility. “I’m not bothered about any of that stuff… as long as you keep your standards high. With every project I take on, I want to try and immerse myself to the point where I feel like I am the artist. When I’m working with Poppy – I’m Poppy! If someone hates it, it hurts me too.
“I want to come away and feel like I’ve given it everything. This is my fucking baby as well,” he concludes. “That’s how I feel about Architects too… I’m an equal when we’re in the studio. I’m emotionally invested in every project and the artist’s career – I want to see them win.”
Architects’ album ‘The Sky, The Earth & All Between’ is out February 28. S10’s single ‘Mijn Haren Ruiken Naar Vuur’, House Of Protection’s EP ‘Galore’ and Poppy’s album ‘Negative Spaces’ are all out now