Bring Me The Horizon frontman Oli Sykes has addressed how he feels about fans of the band who wish they would return to the sound of their earlier work.
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Despite starting out as a deathcore band in the mid-2000s, the Sheffield rockers transitioned to a more mainstream-friendly, electronics-laden sound on their landmark albums ‘Sempiternal’ and ‘That’s The Spirit’, released in 2013 and 2015 respectively.
Speaking to American radio station KFMA, Sykes said he thinks he has managed to “soften my approach” towards those detractors.
“It’s very easy for them people to piss you off and you’re just, like, ‘Fuck off.’ But at the end of the day they just love your band and something you did meant so much to them that they just want you to do it again,” he said [via Blabbermouth]. “And you’ve just gotta realise that even though it might annoy you, it comes from a place of love. And rather than fighting back, you’ve just gotta appreciate that.”
“To a certain degree, we can’t be the band that we used to be. We wouldn’t know how to do it, and we wouldn’t know how to do it with any authenticity or integrity,” he continued. “But sometimes those people can remind you, like, ‘Wait. Are we losing what makes us special?’ And that’s what I’ve asked myself over the years. It’s, like, some people that are sad because we’re not as heavy anymore or whatever, do they have a point?”
He went on: “10 years ago [I never would have thought] that anyone would’ve ever said our band are gonna headline festivals one day or that could be the biggest rock band in the world. And then, all of a sudden, those kind of ideas started formulating and people saying them. And that can go to your head, and then you can start going, ‘Oh, maybe we can.’ And sometimes you get so preoccupied whether you could that you don’t stop to think whether you should.
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“I definitely feel like I’ve listened to some of the fans over the years and, like, ‘You know what? They’re right. We shouldn’t water our shit down.’ Because we’re like one of the last bands that still do heavy music right. So all that stuff just keeps you in line, and you’ve just gotta realise it all comes from a place of love and don’t let it piss you off. And at the same time stay true to yourself. We can’t write music for the fans; it’s impossible. But we can let what they say resonate with us and not just automatically, like, knee-jerk reaction of like, ‘Fuck you. We’ll do what we want.'”
Bring Me The Horizon acknowledged their earlier music during last year’s Malta Weekender, in which they played a ‘throwback set’ full of their old songs.
The band are set to release a new album ‘Post Human: NeX GEn’, on September 15. Speaking to NME exclusively backstage at Download, Sykes described the album as “unhinged” and said it took a great deal of influence from emo and hardcore.
“Linkin Park were the first band that I got into, but when I found Glassjaw is when I became obsessed with music and knew I wanted to be a singer, so the album pays homage to that,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a hyper-pop album, but I’ve definitely been inspired by that world. I admire how obnoxious, trashy and in your face that music feels, which is what I was drawn to when I got into emo, hardcore and screamo.
“It’s not that we’ve lost that in our music, but as you become a bigger band, things do get more polished. I want to go the opposite way. Let’s be unhinged, let’s stop trying to make all the edges smooth.”