Bring Me The Horizon: “We felt like we’d taken heavy music as far as we could’ve taken it”

In the new, September issue of DIY (out Friday 11th September), Bring Me The Horizon talk about how new album ‘That’s The Spirit’ feels like the beginning of a new chapter.

“We felt like we had taken heavy music as far as we could’ve taken it,” says frontman Oli Sykes. “We had squeezed the best out of what we could do; we’ve hit you as hard as we can with a breakdown, with a riff, with a sub-drop and everything else. This time, we really wanted challenge ourselves to hit hard, but with an acoustic guitar. How can it be heavy without any speed, without any screaming?” If ‘That’s The Spirit’ has anything to say, very. “How can we make it powerful and have a massive impact? That is so difficult to do. You can look at these songs as simply-structured songs but it is so much harder to write a simple song than a technical one. To write a song that could become a classic and is gonna hit you hard without any volume or distortion is really hard. That’s what we wanted to do this time; to be heavy in completely different ways.”

Their fifth record, then, is their biggest, boldest statement yet. Having garnered the confidence to start doing things their own way, it became the theme that ran through the record’s story itself. Their latest offering marks their first foray into self-production (“With no disrespect intended to any of the producers that we’ve worked with in the past, it’s always a compromise.”) and saw them visit the Greek Island of Santorini to record, quite simply for the experience. It wasn’t about playing by anyone else’s rules but theirs.

Bring Me The Horizon’s new album ‘That’s The Spirit’ is out now via RCA.

Read the full interview the September 2015 issue of DIY, out Friday 11th September. Pre-order a copy below.