Life, as John Lennon sang, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. A year ago, as they topped the bill at Download for the first time, Bring Me The Horizon were also, finally, making some sort of noise about the second chapter of their POST HUMAN series. It had been long enough: part one, the excellent Survival Horror, had dropped almost out of nowhere almost three years previously, on Halloween weekend 2020.
Put it down to the success of the first bit that the intended four-part run of releases couldn’t come out quite as swiftly as had been expected. Put it down to these things being harder than they look, or lockdown lifting earlier than expected and suddenly the time to work on such projects being at a premium again. Oli Sykes tells Kerrang! that, “The whole thing became a lot bigger than we originally imagined, the whole concept. So, we had to rethink a lot of what we were doing once we realised the size of the whole thing and what it could be.”
A year on from that, following delays, the departure of Jordan Fish, distractions like an arena tour and winning a BRIT Award, and the internet beginning to put it in the Duke Nukem Forever file of long-promised promises, NeX GEn is finally upon us. It may not have arrived within the now-amusing timeframe of a year since the first one, but talk from the time still rings true. As hinted at for so long, it does have more of a mid-2000s Warped Tour post-hardcore flavour than its predecessor. A record that, by necessity of all working remotely, leant into tried and trusted strengths the band knew they had. “The path of least resistance”, as Oli called it.
Here, things are played a lot less straight. NeX GEn definitely recalls those promised sounds, but you also get what Oli means when he says the idea has become bigger than they first thought. Next to the already-heard anthemic bangers Kool-Aid, DArkSide and AMeN, and the MCR-gone-hyperpop rush of LosT, there’s the ballad of sTraNgeRs, dancey electronics on R.I.P., and grunge-gone-weird on n/A (the ‘Hello Oli you fucking knobhead’ sing-along from the tour, captured here, as promised). Shades of Smashing Pumpkins’ breezy alt.rock pop up on YOUtopia, while liMOusIne throws in a bottom-end Deftones riff, and closer DIg It experiments with discordant, ear-itching glitches. Post-hardcore heroes show up in the shapes of Glassjaw man Daryl Palumbo, on DArkSide, and Underoath’s Spencer Chamberlain and Aaron Gillespie on a bulleT w- my namE On.
