Bring Me The Horizon have been around for more than 15 years. Love them (or hate them), they’ve had quite a profound influence on the Metalcore, Alternative Metal, Alternative Rock, Pop Rock, Electronic Rock and Deathcore music genres.
I was extremly lucky to see (and photograph) this band at RAMFest in 2013 (in Johannesburg). They are definitely one of the loudest bands that I’ve watched live. My ears are ringing just thinking back to that memorable night at Riversands Farm (RIP).
There’s probably a few things that you didn’t know about this band, but today my aim is to change that.
Here are 22 Facts You Might Not Have Known About Bring Me The Horizon
1. The band was formed in Sheffield, England in March 2004. All the founding members had been a part of several local and separately defunct bands. After a few months of constant gigging they began to build a small fanbase in their local community and were signed by Thirty Days of Night Records. The band members were aged between 15 and 17 when the band was formed.
2. The current members of Bring Me The Horizon are Oliver Sykes, Matt Kean, Lee Malia, Matt Nicholls and Jordan Fish. Curtis Ward and Jona Weinhofen are the former members of Bring Me The Horizon.
3. To date Bring Me The Horizon have released 6 Studio Albums, 2 Live Albums, 2 Compilation Albums, 2 Video Albums, 34 Music Videos, 4 EPs, 29 Singles, 1 Remix Album and 1 Demo Album.
4. To date the band have been nominated for 2 Grammy Awards, 1 BRIT Award and 3 NME Awards. The band have also been nominated for 17 Kerrang! Awards (of which they’ve won 7).
5. Bring Me The Horizon got their name form a line in Pirates of the Caribbean. Matt Keane told EastScene this story “At the time there were a lot of bands that had names that you would associate with this kind of music. They just stayed away from all the pretentious or predictable stuff. And they were sitting around one day watching the movie and heard the line and thought it would be a laugh.”
6. Oliver Sykes started his own clothing brand, Drop Dead, at the age of 21. It took off in a big way and now has a flagship store in London run by his mom, Carol.
7. Their 2019 album, amo made its debut at #1 on the UK Albums Chart in 2019. Their 2013 album Sempiternal made its debut at #3 and their 2015 album That’s The Spirit made its debut at #2 on the same chart.
8. Their Sempiternal album gets its name from an archaic English word denoting the concept of “everlasting time” that can never actually come to pass. It stems from the Latin word “sempiternus” (a concatenation of root “semper” and suffix “aeternum”).
9. Jona Weinhofen (who played rhythm guitar for Bring Me The Horizon, left the band in January 2013). He made claims that he wrote and recorded a majority of the finalized riffs for Sempiternal. He also stated that he wrote lyrics for the record.
Oliver Sykes contradicted his claims on Twitter with the following statement: “I would like to advise our fans NOT to believe the comments or answers given by Jona Weinhofen regarding our album ‘Sempiternal’. He composed none of the final riffs or music heard on the record, and recorded absolutely nothing heard on the record also. He had no involvement with the lyrics, nor were any lyric meanings ever disclosed to him.”
10. The Bring Me The Horizon song, “The House of Wolves” is about Oliver Sykes dealing with pressures to become religious to help overcome personal problems.
11. In June 2013, Sykes and Bring Me the Horizon were sued by the parents of a 12-year-old girl due to injuries received in the mosh pit while watching the band’s performance during the Warped Tour. This led to Sykes announcing via Twitter that legally he was no longer able to start any form of moshing activities during his concerts. However, he later stated that the suit had been dropped and that moshing was not going to be banned.
12. Their 2016 Live Album Live at the Royal Albert Hall was recorded on 22 April 2016 with accompaniment from the Parallax Orchestra conducted by Simon Dobson. All proceeds from the album are being donated to the Teenage Cancer Trust.
13. Their 2020 EP Post Human: Survival Horror was recorded mostly recorded at a home studio and co-produced by Mick Gordon (a video game composer). Oliver Sykes was inspired to record new music after playing the Doom Eternal video game during the COVID-19 lockdown. Gordon was responsible for the soundtrack to the game.
14. According to Oliver Sykes The lyrics for ‘Wonderful Life’ “were done freestyle in the studio. It’s stream of consciousness-type stuff about getting old and out of touch, being off tour and loving the mundane things in life, I guess because it’s so novel when your life is mainly spent on the road.”
“Things like weekly shops and mowing your lawn are quite nice. People who spend most of their lives away from home can surely relate. I guess on top of that there’s this inner crisis I have of being a boring person but still having a desire to go wild inside me every now and again… But, yeah, all in all, it’s mostly word vomit… but also some of my favourite lyrics. The beginning is 100 percent legit and the irony was just too good, so we left it like that.”
15. According to Jordan Fish “Medicine” is “about people who are negative influences and how when they leave your life things get much better. It’s a mixture of the electronic and radio-friendly elements of our band, but it’s still got characteristics of some of the bigger songs we’ve done before. You’d need to ask Oli who exactly that’s about, but I can think of a few people it might be about.”
16. I’m speaking under correction, but the word on the street is that Oliver Sykes has 54 tattoos on his body.
17. According to a user on LyricInterpretations.com “Sleepwalking” “is clearly about Oliver’s ketamine addiction. In the beginning of the music video, the girl is light complected with a white shird. If you didn’t know already, ketamine in its powdered form is white, this also explains why the area is snowy. The quiet family represens Oliver’s family during some sort of intervention or something.”
18. The song title for “Shadow Moses” is taken from the Metal Gear Solid computer game. The song features the line “This is Sempiternal” which was initially misheard by many as “This is Sandpit Turtle.”
19. According to Oliver Sykes “Throne” “is is all about how you can turn grease to gold. How you can turn negative aspects of what you’ve been through into something amazing.”
20. The band caused controversy in February 2016 when Oliver Sykes trashed Coldplay‘s table at the 2016 NME Awards during a live performance of their track “Happy Song”. Sykes later stated that the act was not an act of “dirty protest”, and suggested that it was “pure coincidence” that Coldplay were sitting at the table he trampled. Coldplay frontman Chris Martin admitted that he had never even heard of Bring Me the Horizon before the incident and he laughed it off, stating that “it was great, very ‘rock and roll'”.
21. During a Bring Me the Horizon show in Jakarta, Indonesia (in November 2023), fans became furious and stormed the stage when the band abruptly ended their performance halfway through. The decision was made due to safety concerns, as the band’s team feared a potential collapse of the stage. Frontman Oli Sykes explained on Instagram that the cancellation was a precautionary measure to avoid a catastrophic incident.
22. The band will release their seventh album Post Human: Next Gen on 12 January 2024.
Well, there you have it, 22 facts that you might not have known about Bring Me The Horizon. If I’ve left out something important, feel free to comment below.
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