How does the first glimpse of Bring Me The Horizon’s next EP hold up?
All bets were already off for what Bring Me The Horizon would do next when they dropped Post Human: Survival Horror a year ago. Having pointedly done pretty much everything but metal on amo – to largely great success, it should be added – a return to pastures heavier was a long-odds prospect. “I can write a fucking breakdown in my sleep,” Oli Sykes told Kerrang! in the wake of amo, stressing the importance of looking forward and not taking the easy road.
Such a heavy EP, then, was something of a gotcha – with people moaning they’d ditched metal, it wasn’t giving in so much as firing the heavy corner of their sound up to an insane degree and saying: “Have ALL the heavy Bring Me The Horizon in the world!”
But where next? Having done the obvious pendulum swing on the first of their proposed four-EP run, options become more subtle. The hint we have from DiE4u is a more anthemic side to Bring Me The Horizon, albeit one in which Oli’s lyrics run through a ditch of dark emotions and uncomfortable confessions.
“DiE4u is a song about toxic obsessions, vices and things you can’t kick,” he’s said of the lyrics. “I think a lot of people went through very similar struggles while in lockdown, coming face to face with yourself and seeing who you really are and what’s important. The song is a triumphant and emotional one for me because it was a time of realisation to kick the things that were no good, and to take the choice in bettering myself.”
It works. After the annihilation and nihilism of Post Human…, this first look at the next stage feels like blinking and adjusting your eyes in the smouldering aftermath, knowing you’re still here, and working out how to live now. In some ways it’s an easy parable of our times, in others, more abstract and wide-reaching and personal. Both are accurate. This is a classic Bring Me The Horizon balance of negatives – fear, emptiness, despair – and the will to push forward and upward.
The rest of the second EP will doubtless bring things into a much more rounded focus (and, inevitably, plant even bigger question marks about the two to come after). But here, alone, DiE4u is, after a dark 18 months, Bring Me The Horizon searching for and sharing the light.
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