She later accused Sykes of his own infidelities, and of slapping and spitting on her. Sykes, however, was soon confronting a new trauma: his first wife cheated on him. His voice strengthened further on 2016’s anthemic That’s the Spirit, which just missed out on the No 1 spot (“We were so gutted, heads in our drinks, like: bloody Stereophonics”), but the album spent a year in the charts and took them to Wembley Arena. He poured the experience into the band’s 2013 major-label breakthrough Sempiternal, telling an awards ceremony audience the following year: “When I got out of rehab I didn’t want to scream any more, I wanted to sing from the fucking rooftops.” Unbeknown to those fans, Sykes was suffering from undiagnosed ADHD and developed an addiction to ketamine. The disaffection was grist for his new band, who built a devoted following across their first three albums. The band performing in New Orleans in October 2019. It would stem from one kid beating me up, to everyone … implanted into me that’s what everyone was going to do to me, going through life.” The end of year 11 prank every year was to beat the shit out of me. “I was the school punching bag,” he says. Now 33, he grew up in Stocksbridge, a small South Yorkshire town between Sheffield and Huddersfield. Tattoos cover his arms and creep around his face, as if he is only just keeping them at bay. We talk through it all in the vegan bar he owns in Sheffield, under the offices of his clothing company, Drop Dead. His passage through hoarse choruses to pop tunefulness reflects his own progress through a hellish childhood, addictions and divorce. Its slick pop was a long way from their roots, back when Sykes would demonically roar over fiddly riffs and stop-start rhythms. That 2018 album was their sixth since forming in Sheffield in 2004, and gave them their first UK No 1 and two Grammy nominations. “Our last album, Amo, we must have spent hundreds of thousands making that, and we’ve made this new one for nothing,” says Sykes. It makes sense, practically and aesthetically, for their “cyberpunk metal” to be built with software. Seven of the nine tracks were made entirely during, and are often about, lockdown the new single Teardrops, on which Sykes yells “Oh God, everything is so fucked!” with exasperated terror, was inspired by rolling news during the pandemic, “how we allow ourselves to be traumatised by it every day, and it’s addictive”.īand members isolated from one another and collaborated over Zoom and FaceTime. The song is included on Bring Me the Horizon’s new EP Post Human: Survival Horror, which features brilliant apocalyptic pop with boyband-style melodies. Sykes castigates “all the king’s sources and all the king’s friends” who “don’t know their arses from their pathogens” and asks: “When we forget the infection / Will we remember the lesson?” Full of theatrical flourishes such as sirens, sneezes and dispassionate cyborg-overlord voices, its volatility – swinging from whispers to giant chords – is evocative of the chaos that has defined 2020. It’s not the time to say, ‘These days shall pass’ and ‘everything will be OK’, because it won’t fucking be OK unless we fucking do something about it.Parasite Eve was released in June and became the first great piece of art about the pandemic. It felt like we were making progress and people were standing up to injustice, but maybe we got too complacent because it’s still happening. Look at the Black Lives Matter protests too. Sykes continued: “This is a moment we all knew was coming one day, but maybe not in our lifetime. That’s what rock music is about – addressing the dark side and processing it.” You can’t just brush over it and expect life to go back to normal, because it fucking ain’t. The world needs more and needs to think about it and remember. In our music we’ve always wanted to escape, but there’s been too much escapism and ignoring the problems in the world. After sitting on it for a while, we realised that this was a reason to release it now more than ever. “We shelved the song for a bit because it felt bit too close to the bone. You can read a bit of Sykes response in the NME interview below:
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