Bring Me the Horizon leader Oli Sykes recently revealed the album that first got him into metal, particularly metalcore and various extreme versions of the genre he found from there. At the same time, he gave a nod to several metal bands that formed his early ear.
Sykes made the revelation during a video Q&A with the heavy metal podcast Sobre La Dosis. In a clip that emerged on Monday (Feb. 21), the Bring Me the Horizon member is asked a series of questions, one of which is what was the first metal record that he bought.
Watch the video down toward the bottom of this post.
“The first metal record I bought?” Sykes echoed. “So, it depends on what you define as metal,” he continued. “The first couple of records were like Linkin Park and stuff like that. But the first album that I was like, Wow, this is metal, was Killswitch Engage.”
Referring to Killswitch Engage’s 2002 album Alive or Just Breathing, the Bring Me the Horizon vocalist explained, “When I put that record on for the first time, I was like, Oh my God, this is too heavy. We were going on holiday; I was going to Spain on a bus from England, and it took like 24 hours. I bought [the album] just before I got on the bus, and when I first listened to it, I was like, This is too heavy for me, I don’t like it. It’s too crazy. But I had nothing else to listen to, so I just kept listening to it.”
By the time he got to Spain, however, the singer was “fucking in love with it,” he said.
Sykes surmised the experience gave him his “taste for heavy music. Because after that, I was listening to all kinds of different death metal, like Decapitated and Suffocation and just harder shit. Zao and stuff like that, which I’m thankful for.”
Bring Me the Horizon made their early trade in deathcore and metalcore, but they’ve since branched out into other styles while retaining a heavy side. They recently recorded a song with pop star Ed Sheeran and are planning their own new EP.
