It’s actually, probably, a good thing that this, of all albums, was a surprise release. Had it not been, no amount of media circustry would’ve been able to hold it up, even for Bring Me The Horizon. This album has been teased and delayed for God knows how long, and its existence implied ever since POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR in 2020. Ramping anything up even further would just feel like overkill, for an album that could never match the standards set by itself.
But at the same time, doesn’t that feel right for Bring Me The Horizon? As the poster-boys for how far a rock band in the 21st Century can go, they’re not above luxuriating in their own myth. They’re, without exception, the most creative in the neighbourhood of mainstream rock and metal they currently live in, inarguably spawning and shaping every major metalcore trend of the last decade, at least. If anyone’s earned the right to pump up every single move they’re to make, it’s them. And yet, acknowledging that only reveals the no-win situation of releasing an album like this in the way that Bring Me The Horizon have. Come with a proper rollout planned, and you risk tiring the thing out before it’s even dropped; announce the release the night before, and there’s every danger that this isn’t the event that your albums are pretty much legislated to be now. (And from an on-the-ground perspective, that does appear to have been the case.)
At this point, though, no one is stupid enough to deny Bring Me The Horizon of any decision. Again, they’re likely one of the most influential modern acts on the planet, entire galaxies removed from the deathcore yobbos of old that everyone was champing at the bit to despise. It’s probably why they can get away with bundling the loose singles they’ve been putting out since 2021 on here, which, in itself, isn’t a wholly new tactic for them. Remember how Drown ended up on That’s The Spirit, despite how inexplicable it felt? Yeah, well, this is like that, but with six songs instead of the one. Take out the interludes, and that’s half of NeX GEn’s tracklist right there.
There is also the need to consider how all of this looks in the direct shadow of SURVIVAL HORROR before it. An EP, for all intents and purposes, it still represents the pinnacle of what modern-day Bring Me The Horizon should strive for. It’s heavy; it’s huge; the songs sound great; and even at the time, it was the most concise manifestation of their vision imaginable. To this day, no one has pulled off this specific sort of genre fusion better than Bring Me The Horizon on that release, for the vast swathes who have tried. In fact, it isn’t a stretch to call it the culmination of every metal ideal in the 2020s, executed so succinctly and effortlessly. That’s the key point—by comparison, NeX GEn has shown every crank and cog turn to get it into this position, almost in laborious detail when it’s been on the docket for so long. You might correctly think that Bring Me The Horizon can get away with murder in the macro sense, but there’s still enough to be revealed when digging through the weeds.
Now, if that all appears to be setting up Bring Me The Horizon as some sacrificial lamb they don’t deserve to be…well, just chill out, okay? A preamble like that can make the perception of this seem way more negative than it is. NeX GEn is characteristically good—really good, even—and far from any sort of skidding halt on Bring Me The Horizon’s part. It’s more that the accumulated nitpicks become a little unavoidable, especially when viewing this as some kind of direct follow-up or addition to a series, as is likely intended. As Bring Me The Horizon push against a sound they’d practically perfected on SURVIVAL HORROR, the pathway for advancement isn’t all that clear, and there is a bit of resistance and pushback that buffets them. Case in point—there’s not a high that pulsates with its own delirium as much as Kingslayer did, and while it’s wrong to say they’re trying to force that back in, there’s clearly a number earmarked for the same purpose that just don’t get as far.
Personal preference matters there, of course, but on an album that’s not all that streamlined to begin with, those kinds of things can jump out more readily. For one, it definitely feels like a piecemeal assembly job. Singles with additional years’ worth of exposure will ultimately do that; especially with the earliest ones DiE4u and sTraNgeRs, there’s no earthly way that they were intended to slot into this album specifically. It’s worse when the sensation falls on a not-particularly-good song, namely Rip (duskCOre RemIx) as the hyperpop-informed cut that’s the most overstimulated and least memorable.
Thankfully, that’s basically where the more severe hang-ups end, and NeX GEn stands up to show how strong Bring Me The Horizon’s handle on their concocted formula is. And you do notice the difference between the genuine article and the hangers-on, in how much more exciting in its flavour profile this is. It’s the usual blend overall—metalcore, alt-metal, hard rock, emo, pop-rock, straight-up pop, and the threading within it all to yield the defining mainstream rock sound of the 2020s. But character is also something that matters, which no one else seems to understand on a level even remotely close to this. There is indeed a way to do this sort of wannabe-provocative depression and suicide ideation right, and it come in Oli Sykes not being a very good singer and the humanity that brings to a lyrical style that’s frequently sucked dry of it. As he splutters bullishly into the very first line of the album on YOUtopia, it’s a pretty dead-on tone-setter for that.
It should be said, however, that even by Bring Me The Horizon’s standards—the kings of a cringe lyric that they are—NeX GEn still comes out with one or two real clangers. “Did my back hurt your knife?” is not a line that should’ve been used once, let alone on two separate occasions. (Though, on the first of those songs a bulleT w- my name On, it’s kind of incredible they gave “If Jesus Christ returns / Well, just kill the fucker twice” to Underøath of all bands.) It’s more the kind you have to take for what it is, overall, though. Obviously on an album upfront about its narrator’s depressive tendencies and clad in an aesthetic of cyberpunk cultism, the ‘not my cup of tea’ of it all is palpable. You learn to live with it when a song like n/A opts to frame it in lackadaisical humour, or when LosT spells out the entire ethos of every facet of Bring Me The Horizon in its first utterance, “Watching Evangelion / With a big, fat slug of ketamine”.
The fact is that Bring Me The Horizon continue to uphold the features of their brand ridiculously well. It comes with not only being the face of the sound, but also having the means and flexibility to do what others can’t, who are more preoccupied with catching up. Other bands like this aren’t getting a Lil Uzi Vert feature (regardless of how haphazard both they and glassjaw’s Daryl Palumbo are on AmEN!), or handsomely filling out a cadre of ethereal-voiced women in their universe thanks to AURORA on liMOusIne. They’re the quirks that Bring Me The Horizon and Bring Me The Horizon alone have laid claim to. And honestly, it’s cool to see them branching out in those shapes, and making these connections that, at the beginning of their journey, would’ve seemed inconceivable.
Of course, the main attraction is and always will be Bring Me The Horizon themselves, for whom there are very few complaints when they’re this proficient. Well, maybe if you’re an OG who thinks any kind of melodic work from them is an instant fail, but there’s little chance that those people have stuck around long enough to air grievances in any kind of meaningful way. While it’s difficult to say that Bring Me The Horizon have ‘matured’ in their approach, they’ve certainly locked onto something that shows proven results. They’ve still got some decent, cutting-edge heaviness in ‘em, as shown on Kool-Aid and the slab-dragging liMOusIne. As for forays into pure pop-rock, Top 10 staTues tHat CriEd bloOd is an unmistakable banger, along with proven hits of singles like DArkSide and DiE4u. And in the rest, YOUtopia’s blatant jacking of Deaf Havana’s Sing riff is at least artfully recontextualised into an arena-rock slammer, and DIg It is such a coolly insidious closer in how it warps and builds that are so synonymous with how this band operates. Even [ost] (spi)ritual, as what would otherwise be a totally irrelevant and disposable interlude—lookin’ at you, [ost] puss-e—manages to foster some real dread in its cycling trap beat and guitars and low-simmering chants. A fluke hit, it might be, but a hit to jot down all the same.
Now, to address the elephant in the room (and how it really needs to be done when discussing the sound specifically), this is the last Bring Me The Horizon album to feature contributions from Jordan Fish. He was arguably the catalyst for their explosion and redefining of their sound on Sempiternal, and while he does still appear on NeX GEn, it’s mainly on those older singles that dropped before his official departure. And this is more an address to absolve the doomsaying, because while his distinctive production presence is missed, the album isn’t starved from the lack of it. A couple of missing fingerprints here and there might be noticeable, perhaps, but overall, Bring Me The Horizon have clearly adapted. There is replicable quality on display, in how densely compressed and quantised the sound can be, for that crackle of futuristic industrialisation. The overall approach is still generally very strong, especially on a song like liMOusIne and how titanic and crushing that is completely independent from a certain name behind its boards.
And besides, a band like Bring Me The Horizon at this stage, having achieved this much, doesn’t live and die on one factor. It’s why NeX GEn still feels like a valid, in-character inclusion in their catalogue, despite a few more obvious flaws. Bring Me The Horizon are so big for a multitude of reasons, and at the end of the day, they’ll subsume the majority of what’s ‘wrong’ about them. They still sound enormous and can produce the songs to benefit from it, and they’re still in no short supply on this very album. Hell, you can see why all the previous singles were packaged in—they’re already proven smashes that fit effortlessly among headliners and festival sets, as if to set the bar for everything else. The fact that they can mostly clear that is a testament to what is, undeniably, an ironclad legacy at this point. Forget any ‘unconventionality’ about this album, or uncertainty about Bring Me The Horizon as a whole—from their throne, they aren’t even close to budging.
For fans of: Linkin Park, Sleep Token, Static Dress
‘POST HUMAN: NeX GEn’ by Bring Me The Horizon is out now on Sony Music Entertainment.
Words by Luke Nuttall
