Bring Me The Horizon tell us about the addiction-tackling “future emo” of new single ‘DiE4u’

Bring Me The Horizon have returned with ‘DiE4u’ – the next taste of their ‘POST HUMAN’ project. Check out our new and exclusive video interview with frontman Oli Sykes above.

Having been teasing fans for some weeks, the Sheffield rock giants have today (September 16) shared the first part of the follow-up to 2020’s acclaimed ‘POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR‘ EP and mini album – with another record in the ‘POST HUMAN’ series to follow in early 2022.

Speaking to NME about the new track, frontman Oli Sykes explained how the lyrics for ‘DiE4u’ revisited his battles with addiction.

“I’m tackling the song as if this unhealthy obsession I have is a relationship – almost like a mistress,” said Sykes. “I’ve learned over the past year while I’ve been recovering that when you’re in it, addiction is like you’re having an affair. You’re doing this thing behind everyone’s back, it’s a secret and it feels like you’re cheating and betraying people. I never saw it in that way. I just thought I was harming myself and not other people. I didn’t realise how much it can fuck up people’s trust.

He continued: “This song is triumphant for me in a way because it’s me finally accepting that I’m not someone who can drink alcohol, smoke weed or do any of these things because I just have a problem with it and it always goes down the same road. That’s not something that I’ve been able to admit to myself. This song is a defiant stamp of me saying, ‘No, I’m making a choice now. I can’t keep doing this for the rest of my life because it’s only going to end up one way’.”

Sykes also explained how this theme fed into more new material. “The topic of the next record is going to be about how as I’m getting older, to ask what are the life lessons that I’ve learned?” he said. “What can I give to the next generation or younger people looking up and listening to us? What is it that I can teach? What are the truths I need to learn and accept myself?

On a more macrocosmic level, Sykes said that the idea of promoting self-worth also allowed for the song to relate to environmental issues too.

“With the things that we do, are they worth losing our livelihoods for, our quality of life or the planet?,” he said. “Before we can change the world, we’ve got to change ourselves. Before we can have compassion for other creatures, we’ve all got to find compassion for ourselves. That’s not something I had for myself. So many people are in this place where they don’t think they’re good enough or worth better.

“Even though this song is quite personal, it can also mean something on a bigger scale if you can conquer that part of your life.”

• READ MORE: Bring Me The Horizon on the cover – “I’m like everyone else: confused, scared and angry”

With ‘DiE4u’ retaining BMTH’s trademark heaviness but driven by what could perhaps be their most pop-driven sound yet, Sykes explained how the rest of the upcoming record would be exploring these two extremes.

“As we’ve evolved since [2013 album] ‘Sempiternal’, we kept pushing ourselves with more mainstream tracks that took us into arenas,” he said. “Like with a lot of rock bands, when you start doing that you’re so focussed on making more palatable music that you naturally start watering down what you do as well. The screaming goes, the heaviness goes and you’re more focussed on that.

“Everyone does it. You’re so into pushing yourself musically that rarely does a band carry on retaining their extreme parts. I thought, ‘What would it be like if we did that? If [our music] still had the intensity and heaviness of our older stuff but we’re still pushing ourselves in similar ways of [2019 album] ‘amo’ – in terms of making the melodies really pop. That’s what I love about music, and that’s where we’ve divided fans.

Sykes went on: “I come from a heavy background and rock music was my first obsession, but at the same time I’ve always loved pop music. How do we blend those two worlds completely and not just make pop-y rock music but make extreme pop music? That was the goal of this record.”

Ultimately, Sykes revealed that their next EP would see them chasing “more contemporary melodies” to find a sound influenced by the emerging hyper-pop scene to create what he describes as “future emo”.

“Pop music and music in general has evolved so much over the last five years,” he told NME. “Melodies are a lot more intricate and a lot quicker. They’re more obscure than they used to be and you can’t really put your finger on what the next huge song is going to be. Whereas ‘POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR’ was definitely very nu-metal-influenced, this one is very emo.”

The frontman continued: “That was a challenge in itself – to take those kinds of influences and make them feel modern and contemporary; not just some throwback shit. For ‘SURVIVAL HORROR’, it was a little bit easier to do because it’s what we do anyway. We knew we wanted to reinvent ourselves for each record. I got into rock music through nu-metal and Linkin Park. With emo and screamo and American hardcore, bands like Blood Brothers, Norma Jean and Glassjaw were how I got completely obsessed with it. That’s what we wanted to pay homage to with this next record. Making it feel contemporary and modern was much more of a challenge than last time.

Sykes added: “It’s hard to not make it feel like some weird, old, crap music. We were doing stuff that sounded like My Chemical Romance and vampire emo bands. It took us a while to get the balance right until we had something that feels emo as fuck but super contemporary. We had this term ‘future emo’ in our heads, plus we were taking a lot of inspiration from this shit that’s popping up called ‘hyper-pop’.

“We wanted to take some of that intensity, craziness and the unhinged-ness of that world and bleed it into our song. It took a little while, but now that we’ve got that first song we know what direction we’re heading in.”

‘DiE4U’ comes with a cinematic video shot in the Ukraine – telling a small part of a longer story that Sykes hopes to continue either through more videos or perhaps even a comic series. Beyond that and their upcoming live shows, Bring Me will be hard at work on the rest of the ‘POST HUMAN’ EP series – with three more in the pipeline.

“I know what I want [the whole project] to do,” Sykes added. “We’ve got a clear direction that the third one will take, and also the fourth one. All I’ll say is that it’s quite asymmetrical and the fourth one is going to be quite a curveball.

“Each one is going to pay a homage to the music we listened to growing up, the music we were and the music we are.”

Watch our full video interview above, where Sykes also tells NME about what to expect from their upcoming live shows, and plans to tour in an environmentally friendly way.

‘DiE4u’ is out now. Bring Me The Horizon’s UK tour kicks off this weekend. Check out tour dates below.

SEPTEMBER 2021

20 – Hull, Bonus Arena
21 – Glasgow, The SSE Hydro
22 – Cardiff, Motorpoint Arena
24 – Sheffield, FlyDSA Arena
25 – Birmingham, Utilita Arena
26 – London The O2 Arena