Oli Sykes has his head in his hands. A couple of weeks ago, the Bring Me The Horizon frontman uploaded a video to Instagram. It showed him re-recording the death growls of Pray For Plagues, the opening track from the band’s 2006 debut album, Count Your Blessings.
The accompanying caption read: ‘Took me a minute to work out how to do some of this shit again.’ The pile-on in the comments was immediate.
“Instantly, it’s like, ‘Fucking hell, his technique is awful. What’s he doing? Why is he doing that?’” Oli groans today.
He left a comment trying to explain – it was an inhale approach he’d used sparingly on the original album – but it only fed the algorithm.
“I don’t go on Instagram much, but when I do now, I guess because I’ve engaged with it, it’s all these rock blogs: ‘Oli Sykes comes back at the fans,’” he despairs. “I hate it. It makes my stomach drop…”
Bring Me The Horizon are no strangers to hate. The clip Oli uploaded was part of an announcement that the band had re-recorded Count Your Blessings and would be releasing it under the name Count Your Blessings | Repented, as well as playing the album in full for the first time ever at two gigs in Manchester in July.
Under-produced, juvenile and messy in its embrace of deathcore, Count Your Blessings captured the young band – Oli was just 19 – at their most raw and disruptive. It immediately won the hearts of thousands of scene kids on MySpace, the nascent social media site that launched countless alternative bands in the mid-00s – even though metal’s old guard tried hard to keep Bring Me from getting through the gates.
Since then, Bring Me have released six more albums, evolving dramatically by bringing in metalcore, melodeath and electronics, and – especially with 2013’s seminal Sempiternal – creating a blueprint for modern metal in the process.
Today, the Oli Sykes who greets us over a Zoom call is the leader of one of the biggest heavy bands in the world. He’s dressed in an olive check shirt, his bleached, ice-blond hair buzzed short enough to show off the string of tattoos across his forehead. He’s dialling in from backstage at the Bell Centre in Montreal, where Bring Me are two days into their North America tour – which includes a sold-out show at iconic New York venue Madison Square Garden.
“It is, unfortunately, part of the lore and what Bring Me is now,” Oli says of the heated conversations in the comments. “There’s forever going to be arguments about which the best era is, which the best album is, if we’re better now, or if we dropped off after Count Your Blessings… that’s going to be there until the end of our band’s career. You have to accept that it’s all just passion.”
If you’d logged into MySpace in 2004, you might have come across the profile of budding frontman Oli Sykes. He liked American deathcore bands such as All Shall Perish and As I Lay Dying, had a thick, sweeping black fringe with blond and brown streaks hanging down past his ears, and was dedicated to maintaining his own page and that of his band, Bring Me The Horizon.
“I was an HTML wizard,” he explains today, speaking in a soft, serious Sheffield drawl, undimmed despite the fact he’s lived in Brazil for the last five years, with his wife, model Alissa Salls – their twins Grey and Zélia arrived last year.
“I did all the Bring Me MySpace stuff. I’d learn how to steal the code from other bands or artists and then change the images, so I was a real little nerd and proper into it on there.”
The first social media platform to gain significant cultural traction, combining music and alternative fashion, MySpace had none of the polish of Facebook or anything else that would take hold later, and featured cluttered backgrounds and autoplaying songs. Crucially, it was easy to upload demos so that anyone, anywhere could hear them. Bring Me regularly played local shows, but this was exposure on a new level.
There’s forever going to be arguments about if we dropped off after Count Your Blessings
Oli Sykes
“We did all these terrible-sounding demos where we recorded the vocals in the bathroom,” Oli explains. “We did all the clichéd things that someone who hasn’t got a clue about making music does! Suddenly, this music were going across the world.”
They signed to UK label Visible Noise, and in 2006 went into Birmingham’s DEP International Studios with producer Dan Sprigg (Napalm Death, Cradle Of Filth) to record Count Your Blessings. Splicing Oli’s love of US hardcore and screamo with guitarists Lee Malia and Curtis Ward’s passion for death metal, thrash and trad, by their own admission, there was little in the way of a grand vision for it.
“We didn’t have much ambition outside wanting to make an album where our friends would come to the shows and mosh,” admits Oli. “We struggled to get 10 songs on that record. That’s why there’s two interludes on there.”
They weren’t overthinking the lyrics, either. For Stevie Wonder’s Eyes Only (Braille) features the line: ‘It’s 3.18, mouth tastes like the corpse of every pregnant teen.’ In (I Used To Make Out With) Medusa, Oli sings: ‘Oh, your beauty is no, no more / So why don’t you just fuck yourself, you stupid fucking whore?’
“I guess at the time we were inspired by bands like Cannibal Corpse and Suffocation. So it was just, ‘What’s the most evil, fucked-up thing we can say?’” Oli explains of the lyrics generally. “But [revisiting them for Repented] I started to realise, ‘Oh, no, there’s a message here.’ I could see it’s songs about being on tour too long and missing family and loved ones. There’s some that could be interpreted as misogynistic. It’s not a sentiment I would put in my music today.”
For Repented, they considered changing some of the words, but decided against it.
“We realised, for better or worse, if we start trying to censor it and change things, it’s pointless doing it,” says Oli. “A lot of opinions and attitudes have changed over the years… and we just have to accept that it is what it is. It lives in its own capsule.”
Count Your Blessings was released on October 30, 2006. Famously, the band were unhappy with the result.
“I still can remember pretty clearly, coming out of the studio in Birmingham – we had it burned to a disc, and I put it on in my car. I had this huge subwoofer in the boot,” Oli recalls. “I was so unhappy with the way it sounded. I obviously loved playing shows, but the way I feel about our music now when I get onstage and play certain songs – I’m like, ‘I fucking love this song!’ – I can’t remember ever feeling that way about it.”
Count Your Blessings was released into a metal scene that, in the UK at least, viewed ‘MySpace bands’ with suspicion. Metal Hammer’s top three albums of the year were Mastodon’s Blood Mountain, Slayer’s Christ Illusion and Iron Maiden’s A Matter Of Life And Death, and traditional metalheads were offended by Bring Me The Horizon’s studded belts, hairsprayed fringes and skinny jeans.
Some magazines painted the band as obnoxious. They had to grow thick skin – and fast. One interviewer asked Oli about a website that had leaked nudes pictures of him.
“He was like, ‘Oh, so your dick’s on the internet? Do you like the fact your dick’s on the internet?’ And I was like, ‘No, who would want a picture of their dick on the internet?’ And it said I’d leaned in and I was snarling at him. We didn’t have no media training, we weren’t briefed and we were very naive. When we got the magazine, my mum were really upset. Everything that was a joke or lighthearted, he’d twisted it to sound aggressive in tone… we were on our guard after that.”
Oli onstage in 2006. (Image credit: Eamonn McCormack/WireImage)
Oli compares it to his experiences of being bullied at school. Even though he was now a professional musician, his interactions with the industry felt similar.
“It just became this thing that you hated Bring Me The Horizon, and Bring Me The Horizon weren’t actually a metal band, and we were these little shits, and we were these snotty people, and I think they kind of turned us into that. We had our backs up against every interview.”
The backlash spilled into their live performances. When they opened for Killswitch Engage in Europe in 2007, some in the audience turned their backs. They were also heckled at their own shows, where, now and again, fights would break out between band and audience in the pit.
“It was very hostile. We didn’t go looking for it whatsoever,” Oli says. “We just had to tread that line between getting on with the gig and looking like it didn’t hurt us, but, you know, backstage after gigs, it did affect us a lot.”
They even cancelled a festival appearance for fear of being attacked.
“We said we were sick, because there were another band there that said when we got there, they were going to shave all our hair off and beat us up. It were mental at first. It were that era, when people latched onto something, like, ‘We hate this band, we hate My Chemical Romance.’ It were everyone.”
The volatility around the band escalated, and Oli made headlines in 2007 when he was arrested for allegedly urinating on a female fan who was on their bus – something he has always strongly denied. Charges were dropped.
“It was all lessons that I needed to learn,” he reflects. “I can sit here and defend myself from all that stuff, but at the end of the day, we were being idiots, and it was that realisation that there’s people out there that can hang you up to dry for that kind of shit. I’m glad all that stuff happened because it gave me pause personally. It gave me time to go, ‘Where the fuck am I going in my life?’, because it could have been something much worse.
“Things could have got way out of hand if we just carried on that trajectory, just getting pissed every night, getting into fights, bringing people on our bus that we didn’t know,” he continues. “Mate, I think back on my life and the amount of times I could have died, could have crashed my car. I’m so, so lucky to be even alive, let alone to have a career at this point. It gives me fucking shudders.”
20 years later, Count Your Blessings is being re-released in a different environment. Deathcore is in its blockbuster era, with bands such as Lorna Shore and Slaughter To Prevail proving disgustingly heavy music can flourish on a mass scale. For Oli, the timing is more than sheer coincidence – it’s a reflection of a turbulent global landscape.
“It couldn’t have come at a better time,” he says. “We’re seeing this real revival and love for it, and all these kids getting into it. It makes perfect sense, though, because in the early 2000s, America was starting [to go to war] with the Middle East, and there was a lot of uncertainty. I think that kind of tension fuels a yearning and a need for something more extreme.
“I think there’s two types of people in the world: some people want to listen to Happy by Pharrell and make themselves feel better and disassociate, and other people need to face it head-on.”
And you’re the latter?
“Definitely, yes. I want to talk about it. I want someone to agree with me that the world feels scary. That makes me feel better. I think deathcore is almost like escapism in the opposite direction: if everything’s fucked, let’s just press the fucking button and go to the core of evilness and live in there for a bit, because I’m already feeling like that anyway.”
For Repented, they worked with Buster Odeholm (who produced Orbit Culture’s 2025 album Death Above Life, and is also a guitarist in Humanity’s Last Breath and drummer of Vildhjarta), who’s cleaned everything up and given the music a sharp slap. Some fans may mourn the grittiness of the original, but this new version is what Oli longed to hear on his car stereo – “We would have been over the moon!”
I think there’s this new wave of kids going, ‘Oh my god, Bruno Mars and Sabrina Carpenter don’t do it for me.’ And I think that’s why we’re still connecting.
It might even end up being some people’s introduction to metal…
“I think there’s this new wave of kids going, ‘Oh my god, Bruno Mars and Sabrina Carpenter don’t do it for me. I want to tap into something a bit deeper, a bit more raw.’ And I think that’s why we’re still connecting with kids even today, because our band does that,” says Oli.
It’s also a different era for Oli. Now a family man, who goes to bed early, has a personal trainer on tour and plays arenas, re-recording Count Your Blessings gave him “a lot more appreciation and love and respect” for his teenage self – the kid scrabbling around to fill 10 songs on a scrappy debut that would somehow end up meaning the world to their fans.
Three days after our chat, Bring Me play Madison Square Garden. As the set ends on a triumphant Throne and confetti streams from the ceiling, Oli stares out at a crowd that represents 20 years of progress, tears running down his face.
“We don’t take anything for granted,” the frontman had told us. “We have this massive underdog mentality because of the trauma we faced from all the hatred. It doesn’t matter how big we get, how well we do, we always think that someone’s out to get us. I think at the same time, we have managed to counteract that with, ‘No, stop and smell the roses, appreciate what you’ve done, and be grateful.’”
This article originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 415, July 2026. Order your copy now and get it delivered directly to your door.
Count Your Blessings | Repented is out today (Friday, July 10) via RCA and Sony. Bring Me The Horizon will play the album in full at B.E.C. Arena in Manchester tonight and on Saturday (July 11). The band will then tour the Americas from August to October.
(Image credit: Outbreak)
