Author: fgt

Deathcore dickheads. Heavy metal’s whipping boys. Trailblazers. Bona fide festival headliners… Ed Sheeran collaborators? Bring Me The Horizon’s career arc is like no other band’s. Forming in 2004, the Sheffield feather-rustlers clambered to the top of the tree by setting trends, then scampering off before everyone else snaffled up the fruits of their labour. But which of Bring Me’s experiments paid off, and which earned them a Sunday headline slot in Download Festival’s portaloos? Let’s rank their back catalogue and find out. 

9. Music To Listen To… (2019)

Music To Listen To… is an album with a title so long, we’re not typing it here. Google it. Anyway, it is an album, despite being promoted as an EP – the bastard’s nearly longer than Shrek. It’s a loose, unstructured collaboration between vocalist Oli Sykes and keyboard player Jordan Fish, wherein they loop samples, pile in guests, and make everyone feel deservedly bad for eating animals and destroying the planet. It’s a shame that none of it sticks, though – Sykes recorded one rambling monologue while he was stoned, giving you a peek into how little of a toss you should give this Baby’s First Aphex Twin. 

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8. Count Your Blessings (2006)

If you want to hear five teenagers making a racket and being bw00tal, then stick Count Your Blessings on. It’s not a crap record, but BMTH’s debut is a derivative affair possessing few of the hallmarks that made them unique later on. Even Pray For Plagues, the album’s go-to track, follows a formula Carnifex would better the following year. The whole thing is basically a load of beatdowns, Sykes going “BWEEEEEEE!” and the Lee Malia/Curtis Ward At The Gates fanclub operating at a furious level. If that’s your bag, gape your flappy earlobes and get your crab-walk on.

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7. amo (2019)

Bring Me’s sixth album caused division among loyalists. Dunking on the scene that ostracised them on the aptly titled Heavy Metal and straying into straight-up electronica and pop elsewhere, amo captures a band burning their past without thinking of where they’re going next. It’s disjointed, it doesn’t quite work, but hey, there’s some catchy songs. And a Dani Filth guest spot, if that’s your thing…

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6. POST HUMAN: NeX GEN (2024)

BMTH surprise-dropped POST HUMAN: NeX GEN in May 2024, five months after surprise-dropping Jordan Fish. His fingerprints are still everywhere, pole-vaulting the band over nu metal, jungle, ‘90s alt-rock, industrial, hyperpop, death metal and pretty much everything else apart from, dunno, polka. About as organic as a Pot Noodle and intentionally so, NeX GEN is rarely boring but often questionable. Lyrics like ‘Make love to a chainsaw’ are the lamest shit since socks and sandals, the record’s about twenty minutes too long… but when they’re packing choruses like LosT and Top 10 staTues tHat CriEd bloOd, Bring Me almost make you forget all of that. Almost.

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5. That’s The Spirit (2015)

Sempiternal saw BMTH shift further from the extremities of yore, but their fifth record, That’s The Spirit, is unrecognisable compared to Count Your Blessings. Fish – now a fully-fledged member – sinks his teeth into Throne and Blasphemy, transforming the band into an arena-ready, electro-rock behemoth. 

Sykes’ falsetto croon on Doomed is a shocker, as is his mostly-clean delivery throughout the album. Malia’s gnarled riffs seldom pop up, but when Happy Song arrives, you’re gonna need a neck brace and a nappy. That’s The Spirit took BMTH into bigger venues for a reason. 

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4. Post Human: Survival Horror (2020)

Coming less than a year after Songs To Wank To Cry To, this album – it’s an album, it’s longer than Reign In Blood – proved that BMTH could still pen metal bangers capable of caving in arena roofs. The focus here is simple: huge Linkin Park choruses, ch0nky riffs, garish electronics and more guests than a Boris Johnson office party. Cobbled together during the first wave of COVID and produced by DOOM Eternal’s Mick Gordon, the whole thing’s got more than a whiff of the aforementioned video game about it. Violent, blunt, just a bit mental. The mish-mash of Prodigy electronics, early Bring Me savagery and an unhinged Babymetal feature on Kingslayer also gave us the band’s best song since the Sempiternal days. 

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3. Suicide Season (2008)

A complete reinvention was in order after Count Your Blessings, so BMTH flew to Sweden and recorded their second LP in relative isolation. The spasmodic digital effects synonymous with the band crept in alongside the usual gang vocals and beatdowns, as is evident straight off the bat with The Comedown – Matt Nicholls implements some of his most treacherous drum fills here, too.

Count Your Blessings’ merciless noise is recalled through the woefully-titled No Need For Introductions, I’ve Read About Girls Like You On The Backs Of Toilet Doors, but Suicide Season is better than that. Chelsea Smile’s vocal hook is a winner to this day, and the title track’s eight-minute duration is a sprawling display of sonic misery, establishing BMTH as forerunners in modern heavy music.

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2. Sempiternal (2013)

People finally caught up and started taking BMTH seriously, if only because Sempiternal’s Linkin Park-inspired choruses and Fish’s polished, earworm keys are just too potent to ignore. Sykes’ yelling is tailored to the Terry Date production job, the likes of Shadow Moses and Antivist showcasing the vocalist’s tight-throated rage at its zenith but in a cleaner, more direct manner. Hospital For Souls takes his newfound melodies and pits them against luscious keys for an almost Deftones-esque seven minutes. Sempiternal’s main selling point sees heads-down riffing bounce around delicate, dare we say radio-friendly sections, setting BMTH up for That’s The Spirit, arena tours and, er, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.

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1. There Is A Hell, Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There Is A Heaven, Let’s Keep It A Secret (2010)

Crucify Me: BMTH’s finest moment. Suicide Season’s glitching electronics smooth over into ambience amid the feral chugging and Sykes’ rallying cry: “I am an ocean, I am the sea. There is a world inside of me.”  You still get your old-school brutality with Alligator Blood, Home Sweet Hole and The Fox And The Wolf, but it’s counteracted by Blessed With A Curse’s progressive leanings, Memorial’s low-key restraint and those delicate, beautifully plucked strings during Don’t Go.

There Is A Hell… is the sound of an already-experimental group pushing themselves further than they’ve ever gone and straight out of the shitty, elitist scene that refused to accept them. The best thing to come from Sheffield since The Full Monty.

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Alec is a longtime contributor with first-class BA Honours in English with Creative Writing, and has worked for Metal Hammer since 2014. Over the years, he’s written for Noisey, Stereoboard, uDiscoverMusic, and the good ship Hammer, interviewing major bands like Slipknot, Rammstein, and Tenacious D (plus some black metal bands your cool uncle might know). He’s read Ulysses thrice, and it got worse each time.

In terms of sheer weight of importance, there really aren’t many artists in pop culture history that can come close to matching the impact made by Daryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels, Joseph “Run” Simmons and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell. They’re arguably the group responsible for rap’s ascent into the mainstream, for making hip hop harder and more reflective of its underground street roots and for crossing the genre over into the rock world. Between their formation in 1983 and Mizell’s tragic death in 2002, they made seven albums and changed the face of music forever. Here are all of those records ranked from worst to best.

7. Crown Royal (2001)

If Run-D.M.C. had to adapt their style at the start of the 90s (with mixed results), going eight years without an album and having to do it again as a new Millennium dawned was always going to be daunting. The trio’s final album definitely tried to sound current but relies too heavily on features that range from the sublime (Method Man and Nas) to the ridiculous (Everlast, Sugar Ray and Kid Rock). It’s not a disaster, but hearing Fred Durst wheezing his way through the atrocious country twang of Them Girls diminishes the impact of the superb, classic New York hip-hop of Queens Day. A disappointing if inadvertent final statement.

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6. Back From Hell (1990)

Hip-hop was in a state of flux by the time Run-D.M.C. released their fifth album. With gangsta rap becoming infamous in its infancy and the hip-pop of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice the genre’s big sellers, Queens’ finest needed to pivot in some way back towards the musical landscape they had helped create. The trio decided to head for harder terrain, with the excellent, rip-snorting What’s It All About sampling both The Stone Roses and Minor Threat, but there were also a few dalliances with the zeitgeisty sound of new jack swing on Faces and Pause. A touch confused? Maybe, but by no means a bad experiment.

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5. Down with the King (1993)

After slightly fumbling the ball on their previous album, Run-D.M.C. got the balance of sounding like the classic version of themselves and adding a contemporary twist far better on Down With The King. The likes of Can I Get It, Yo, 3 In the Head and Big Willie all give their classic big beat and dual-vocal, barking a rap a bit of 90s spit-and-polish, while top notch features from EPMD, Q-Tip, Tom Morello and Onyx only add to the fun. 

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4. King Of Rock (1985)

How do you follow a debut album of such groundbreaking influence and importance? Well, in Run-D.M.C.’s case, just crank it all up a bit harder and louder than before, add in a bit more rock guitar and some dancehall influences, and there you have it. King Of Rock may not have quite the revolutionary qualities of its predecessor, but it does take everything that was great about that album and add a few essential sonic deviations. It’s something perfectly surmised by the sublime one-two of the title track’s hard rock fury and the aggro funk of You Talk Too Much.

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3. Tougher Than Leather (1988)

It was always going to be a hell of an ask to follow up Raising Hell, meaning that, upon release, Tougher Than Leather got a fairly lukewarm reaction. Decades down the line, however, it’s been re-evaluated for the incredible record it is. Both Run’s House and Mary Mary became huge songs in their discography, but listen to lesser remembered tracks, such as the superb electro-funk of first single I’m Not Going Out Like That or the jittering boom-bap of Radio, and you’ll find a diverse effort jam-packed full of gems.

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2. Run-D.M.C. (1983)

The big bang for rap as we all came to know it. Run-D.M.C.’s debut album is one of the most important albums of all time; responsible for making rap harder, sparser and more aggressive, it also contains Rock Box, the first hip-hop song ever played on MTV and the first ever rap-rock crossover track. All very worthy, but, truthfully, the trio would become better M.C’s, expand their sound and improve their production in the future. Still, at the time, Run-D.M.C. sounded genuinely revolutionary and even 40 years later Wake Up, It’s Like That and Hard Times are all essential listening for any hip-hop fan.

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1. Raising Hell (1986)

If Run-D.M.C. were creating blueprints for where the rap genre would go on their first two albums, it’s here on their third where they made their true masterpiece. Raising Hell starts with Simmons and McDaniels tag-teaming rhmes on Peter Piper with a dexterity miles above what they had shown before. It’s a high bar from which Raising Hell never drops below: there are huge, instant, hook-filled bangers like It’s Tricky; amazing big-beat ragers like Hit it Run; some of Jam Master Jay’s finest and most surprising production choices on the likes of You Be Illin; and, of course, the true rap-rock big bang of Walk This Way alongside Aerosmith. It was rap’s first ever Platinum-selling album. It just might also be the genre’s first true classic.

Since blagging his way onto the Hammer team a decade ago, Stephen has written countless features and reviews for the magazine, usually specialising in punk, hardcore and 90s metal, and still holds out the faint hope of one day getting his beloved U2 into the pages of the mag. He also regularly spouts his opinions on the Metal Hammer Podcast.