Bring Me The Horizon - Count Your Blessings | Repented
Oh, look at how far Bring Me The Horizon have come in the last twenty years. The band has evolved from the sloppy deathcore wunderkinds into main-stage-ready festival headliners after years of grinding it out on the road, reshaping their sound, and pushing themselves to hell and back. The band’s mainstream popularity began to take shape around 2015 when they released That’s The Spirit, which found the UK four-piece (then a five-piece) trading metalcore breakdowns for arena anthems. 2019’s amo, 2020’s POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR, and 2024’s POST HUMAN: NeX GEn built upon that evolution; hints of the band’s past would turn up every once in a while, but everyone felt pretty confident that vocalist Oli Sykes had traded in his throat-shredding guttural screams for (mostly) clean melodies.
So you could imagine my face when I learned that the band would be re-recording their 2006 debut album Count Your Blessings, an album that quite literally screams of the old MySpace era that once put Bring Me The Horizon into the scene spotlight. The ten songs on Count Your Blessings were always rough around the edges, attracting enough of an audience for the band in the beginning but never guaranteeing that they would be a bona fide hit. The re-recording - dubbed Count Your Blessings | Repented - vastly improves upon the quality of the track recordings and gives these songs the absolutely brutal moment in the limelight they’ve always deserved.
A funny thing about Count Your Blessings: you can tell it was written by a group of teenagers, fresh on the scene, trying to get some things off their chests. There was an aura of misogyny that once existed in this genre, and one has to look no further than the opening lines of “Pray For Plagues” to see it (“She starts her new diet of liquor and dick/Just like Hollywood, but laced in sick/The sun goes down, and so does she”). These were the days when Sykes and Co. were not singing about the existential nature of life nor battling with depression and growing as human beings. No, the lyrics are as tongue-in-cheek as the song titles, like “Tell Slater Not To Wash His Dick”, “For Stevie Wonder’s Eyes Only (Braille)”, and “(I Used To Make Out With) Medusa”. The latter finds Sykes screaming bloody murder about a breakup with all the subtlety of a car crash (“Your beauty is no more/So why don’t you just fuck yourself, you fucking whore?”)
Of any band within this scene, Bring Me The Horizon have grown the most. They’ve retained the charm and heaviness of their original music while continuously stepping outside of the box on every album they’ve released since then. The changes were gradual, until it sounded like an entirely new band altogether twenty years later. A release like Count Your Blessings | Repented is fun to listen to as it acts like a time capsule: you can see where they were lyrically and musically two decades ago, yet they can come back, make every breakdown heavier, every scream bloodier, and make it look easy. Perhaps the best thing to come out of this re-release is “Dehumanized”, a brand new bonus track written in the style of the Count Your Blessings era. It is undoubtedly the heaviest song they’ve ever written.
Bring Me The Horizon never forgot who they were; they just got better.
