Oliver Sykes — vocalist, lyricist and founder of Bring Me the Horizon — led one of the most complete transformations ever undertaken by a heavy rock band. He founded the group in Sheffield, England, while still a teenager, and the first record, Count Your Blessings (2006), is raw deathcore: exclusively guttural vocals, heavy riffs and no melodic concession. Almost twenty years later, Bring Me the Horizon plays stadiums with a repertoire combining alternative rock, electronics, pop and orchestration — and Sykes sings clean most of the time. That crossing was made record by record, each shifting the band a little further. There Is a Hell... (2010) introduced choirs and atmosphere; Sempiternal (2013) brought synthesizers to the centre; That's the Spirit (2015) almost entirely abandoned the growls; amo (2019) took in electronic pop without shame. At each step, part of the old audience was lost and a larger one appeared. His lyrics follow that change: they moved from the generic vocabulary of extreme metal to direct accounts of addiction, anxiety and recovery — Sykes has spoken publicly about his ketamine dependency and the period of treatment that interrupted it. That is why Bring Me the Horizon occupies an unusual position: a band that changed genre several times without the change looking like calculation, because the content changed with it.
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