In 2019, Ole Sykes predicts “a damn psychological disaster in two years … we’re literally at the end, doesn’t it feel like this for you?” Imagine a tsunami or a volcano.
His lyrics are from Underground Big, which is a 24-minute long single for his band bring me the HORIZON, And the first two spikes from this Cassandra rock. Close the second time around with Parasite Eve, a song about a pandemic. He says now: “I read about this supernatural defect in Japan that was killing many people, and the article was saying that this is the next war that humanity will face.” “I didn’t think it would come this year.”
When the Covid-19 virus spread and people started to die, the band paused their unreleased song. “I was dealing with it as a video game, or fantasy – and someone was hearing this and he had just lost his grandfather or his mother,” Sykes says. But the group thought again: “Maybe there are all these people who need a laxative experience. Nobody writes songs about this – and we have one. It’s going to help people tackle how dark it is right now. That’s what rock music is all about.”
Parasite Eve was released in June and became the first great piece of art on the pandemic. Filled with theatrical booms like sirens and sneezes and the honest voices of cyborg-overlord, its volatility – swinging from whispers to giant strings – stirred up the chaos that marked the year 2020. Sykes criticizes “all the king’s sources and all the king’s friends” whose “donkeys we don’t know are pathogens” and asks: “When we forget the infection / Will we remember the lesson?”
The song was included in the new Bring Me the Horizon EP Post Human: Survival Horror, which features great shocking pop music with boyband-style melodies. Seven of the nine tracks were fully made during lockdown, often around; The new Teardrops single, to which Sykes shouts “Oh my God, it’s all bad!” With angry terror, inspired by the news circulating during the pandemic, “How do we allow ourselves to go through a psychological trauma from it every day, which is an addiction.”
The band members isolated from each other and collaborated via Zoom and FaceTime. It stands to reason, both practically and aesthetically, that “cyberpunk metal” should be built using software. “Our latest album, Amo, must have spent hundreds of thousands making it, and we made this new album for nothing,” Sykes says.
This 2018 album was the sixth since its formation in Sheffield in 2004, and it earned them their first UK album # 1 and two Grammy Award nominations. The gorgeous pop was far from their rootsBack when Sykes roars demonically over the thick countryside and pausing rhythms. His passage through loud choruses to pop tone reflects his own progression during a childhood of Hell, addiction and divorce.
Talking about it all at the botanical bar he owns in Sheffield, under his clothing company offices, Fall dead. Tattoos cover his arms and creep around his face, as if he is just keeping them away. Now 33 years old, he grew up in Stocksbridge, a small town in South Yorkshire between Sheffield and Huddersfield. “I was a punching bag at school,” he says. “Literally. The joke at the end of the eleventh year of every year was to get over my disgust. It would stem from a kid hitting me, for everyone … [it was] It was planted in me and this is what everyone would have done with me, during life. “
It was upset with his new band, which had built a loyal following across their first three albums. Unbeknownst to these fans, Sykes was suffering from undiagnosed ADHD and developed an addiction to ketamine. He poured experience into the band’s main 2013 breakthrough eternalHe told an award-winning audience the following year, “When I got out of rehab, I didn’t want to scream again, I wanted to sing from the damn rooftops.”
His voice grew stronger in the 2016 anthem This is the spirit, Who just missed # 1 (“We were so broken, our heads at our drinks, like: bloody Stereophonics”), but the album spent a year in the charts and took them to Wembley Arena. However, Sykes soon faced a new shock: he was deceived by his first wife. Sykes was later accused of betraying him, slapping and spitting on her.
He denies everything. “I said, ‘I love you, but I can’t do it anymore.'” I kept calm so much … until you come out and picture me as an abusive person, that was unbelievable. ”But he says,“ I’ve been in relationships where I cheated on the other person – I wasn’t always a saint. And the [his ex-wife] She was having a really hard time when it happened, so there was always more concern about it than hate. The night I discovered was a dark time. This is beyond my anger, the safety of this person. “
Amo, made after such a painful breakup, was for the most part surprisingly relaxed. “Spitting on heavy guitars looked like I was hoping for bad, but I didn’t,” Sykes says. He also met his second wife Alyssa Sals. “We do not argue. He is extremely loving, compassionate, open-minded and confident. People stay in abusive relationships, whether emotional or physical, because they think:“ This is love, love is difficult. ”But this ideal and idealistic fantasy thing, is not a fiction: you just have to find people Appropriate “.
Safer Sykes continued to write upbeat songs, but then, as the shutdown began, he suffered from a resurgence of anxiety that arose in school. “My normal life was to do shows for thousands of people. This dark world kept in trouble. When it was all gone, I felt a little valuable.” He underwent the first therapy sessions ever, and his therapist linked the trauma of Sykes on the court with his “tendency to think that everyone thinks about the worst of myself. The next time I start to think negatively, I’m like: Wait a minute, your mind does it automatically.”
However, as the world got heavier, so did the band’s music. “At first, I was like, ‘I wear pajamas every day, I’m sick,’” Sykes says. ”But after a while, things like this start to make you feel inhuman. You’re sitting there playing Monopoly when there are people dying. ”The EP editorial, Dear Diary, is a die-hard villain about this predicament, with the chorus“ Heaven is Falling / It’s So Boring. ”And there is a line in Parasite Eve,“ Life is a Prison and Death is a Door ”, Sykes says it’s about not being able to go out during a pandemic. But could this send the wrong message to vulnerable listeners? He says, “You always take risks when you write the kind of things I’m writing.” Where does my technician stop in terms of everyone’s safety? It is not something that I take joyfully with. It’s not romanticizing or glorifying … it’s what makes me feel this particular thing. “
Bring Me the Horizon ‘artificial sound evokes a stifling digital presence; Sykes says he developed an addiction to his locked phone. The loud voices have returned, but where his anger once hung on himself, he now connected to everything else. “With this record, there is something you yell about,” he continues. “I feel angry … I’m tired of the way I dressed, but I’ve always had the freedom to do so. While there are still people who are persecuted every day because of the way they were born, whether it be their skin color or their sexual preference.”
Sykes was already somewhat stressed about politics and society. He did not vote in the last election, saying Jeremy Corbyn “was walking on eggshells, walking that line between what he really wanted to do and what he was saying” – but that he had a basic belief in the British government. “Like, they might not always make the right decisions, but they are not inherently evil, while I was getting that feeling from America. Every man for himself, this is the American dream, while in England I felt like there was more camaraderie.” But he says, in something like the friendship of Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew, “I’m starting to see this corruption seep in.” He asks, “With the shutdown, are they really trying to do the best for us? Travel lanes, for example: Are they going: Give us a good Brexit deal? It’s just hard to see them as an unconditionally interested government now.”
Victims of a decade of austerity may wonder what took so long. Sykes says he was “arrogant and comfortable” about his political involvement in the past: “Before that, I used vegan as,” Well, I’m doing my part for the world. Science during the climate crisis. “I’m a little pessimistic. But what I’m hoping for is – well, not hope, because that looks bleak – but something really bad will happen. Since we are not eliminated, but it is enough to return from it. Because that’s the only way people will see.
We need something worse than Corona virus? “Unfortunately, humanity is awakening. We have to evolve out of divide and conquer … We don’t like our reality to be shattered, or even bent. But you have to keep your mind soft and flexible.”
He uses the Black Lives Matter movement as an example. Your first impulse when someone says you are racist is to say, “No, I’m not silly.” But if you listen and remove your ego from the equation… because you don’t know all the ways to build systems. It’s the same with everything in life.
After years of personal chaos, then, Sykes is experiencing an equally messy political awakening. “Whether it’s love or government, you have to better demand,” he says, beginning to separate the signal from the noise.
• Post Human: Survival Horror is now over
