Photo by Nat Wood
It’s only two weeks after Outbreak Festival’s fifteenth anniversary weekend, but filing back into the Bowlers Exhibition Centre in Manchester under the sun there’s a sense of déjà vu as there’s something more still to celebrate. Bring Me The Horizon, arguably the biggest and most influential metal band of their generation, veterans of countless huge arena shows and rock festival headlines, are feeling the draw again of getting up close and personal, and down and dirty.
2026 so far has been all about Count Your Blessings for them, their 2006 debut album released back when, as the poster for this event reads, the world-conquering band were just “scrappy deathcore played by a bunch of hair farmers from Sheffield, UK”. They’ve just released the album re-recorded in its entirety under the title Count Your Blessings | Repented, returning to the original record’s blood-caked MySpace-era sliminess and suping it up with a more contemporary, mechanically destructive tone. Over the weekend the band partnered up with Outbreak to celebrate 20th anniversary, utilising Outbreak’s particular no-barrier set-up to bring this breakneck, murderous record back to the world from which it was born, yet still in front of 10,000 people on each of two sold out nights.
Photo by Eddy Maynard
The air of homecoming to the scene from which they came is present from the very first band of the carefully curated bill, as UK hardcore band Still In Love are comprised of several UKHC scene veterans, including original Count Your Blessings-era Bring Me The Horizon guitarist Curtis Ward. With raging fast blast parts and manic brandishing of their instruments, they’re a very good omen for the rest of the day managing to keep the hardcore spirit of Outbreak alive and well on a day taken over by one of modern metalcore’s defining acts.
Showing Teeth | Photo by Eddy Maynard
Nashville’s Showing Teeth does bring that crossover metalcore flair, with downtuned eight-string riff battery and dexterous, even slapped bass rhythmic interplay, but the squalling guitar breakdowns against her particularly venomous shrieks bring the gnarled edge that is necessary to hang on such a heavy day.
Car Underwater meanwhile are the palette cleanser coming from another side of what “The Scene” of the Count Your Blessings days had to offer, pulling together glimmering liquid synths and a twin vocalist dynamic delivering vintage post-hardcore melodies for a dose of sugary sweet emo.
Heriot | Photo by Ashlea Bea
There’s a delectable choice of bruisings across the day’s two stages. While UK metallic hardcore noise crew Heriot deliver one to the indoor crowd, outside on the main stage it’s Portland’s Dying Wish who take utmost glee in having these two chances to rip into this waiting audience. Emma Boster is grinning like a hungry wolf, high-kicking and gnashing her teeth through some of the meanest metalcore songs of this decade. “Cowards Feed, Cowards Bleed” from debut record “Fragments of a Bitter Memory” blitzes by in a flash, but the likes of “I Don’t Belong Anywhere” and “I’ll Know You’re Not Around” from newest record Flesh Stays Together set their gauges to a more oppressive and tar-thick darkness.
Dying Wish | Photo by Eddy Maynard
Static Dress return to the scene of the crime after their surprise set at Outbreak proper two weeks ago (they don’t try to trick people into thinking they’re Title Fight this time), and with a kinship with Bring Me The Horizon’s current audience already established from having joined them on tour, continue right where they left off with the momentum of new album “Injury Episode” carrying through into this. Dying Wish’s Emma Boster and Showing Teeth joining them for “Courtney, Just Relax” and “Nostalgia Kills” respectively gives the bill an even more communal feeling even amongst the younger acts.
Static Dress | Photo by Nat Wood
For the old school fans this is particularly true given the presence of Rolo Tomassi. As keyboardist and co-vocalist James Spence relates from the stage, twenty-one years ago they played their first show at a bar opening for their Sheffield peers Bring Me The Horizon. They too are one of the great enduring lights of the 21st century UK metalcore and hardcore scene, and while there may perhaps have been some temptation to join Bring Me The Horizon in throwing it back to their earlier and grimier days, Rolo Tomassi opt for a reminder of what a phenomenal outfit they still are. The cuts from 2022’s Where Myth Becomes Memory lay on thick layers of dizzying tech metal guitars and unrelentingly precise polyrhythms, while the dream-pop of “Aftermath” and an absolutely stunning rendition of the eight-minute “A Flood of Light” bring a delicate touch and patience of atmosphere well and truly amongst the elite of their field.
Rolo Tomassi | Photo by Eddy Maynard
When Bring Me The Horizon released the original version of Count Your Blessings in 2006, almost nobody, including fans of the record, could have imagined it’d lead to something like this. For its primordial gurgle of adolescent vitriol and naivety, it earned as much scorn as adoration. Recollections of violence threatened against them at early shows or vaguely homophobic haircut-related ridicule dog the band’s older days.
Once they released follow-up album Suicide Season and put themselves on the path to eventually becoming the unrivalled scene leaders of their era with the likes of 2013’s Sempiternal, Count Your Blessings became the red-headed stepchild of the catalogue, unloved and shunned away to the corner except by the few deathcore purist faithful in their ever-burgeoning fanbase. The idea that they would return to it seemed unthinkable, because truthfully Bring Me The Horizon never needed to. Time heals many things though, and here we stand, witnessing the resurrected form of deathcore Bring Me The Horizon biting back with a vengeance.
For a band who have so consistently forged forward, it’s a rare but very welcome moment of nostalgia, not just to throw things back to this unique moment in their career history but to take stock of and toast how far they and their audience have come. There are the old-heads here who joined Bring Me The Horizon in those grungy venues of the mid 00s, but there’s also an army of younger fans who have come to Bring Me amidst their time at top yet are hungry and curious to catch this incarnation of their favourite band not seen during their years, and in such a unique environment.
Bring Me the Horizon | Photo by Eddy Maynard
It starts with “Pray for Plagues”, the monstrous calling card of Bring Me The Horizon’s heaviest years, played sparingly at special occasions over the last fifteen years but here tonight the beloved familiar anthem. With its breathless sequence of multiple hooks from the album-defining “Count your fucking blessings!” (Oli at one point donning a St. George’s flag bucket hat with the slogan scrawled across the top) to the final clapping of the hands to the sound of every first born dying now, it is and always has been a masterstroke of mid 00s deathcore hit-making, and the crowd react reliably giddy in return.
It’s the rest of the album that’s uncharted territory, most of these songs having not been aired since the band that made them moved on to pastures new some fifteen plus years ago. The energy that’s maintained for the remaining half hour of Count Your Blessings though is delirious. Songs like “For Stevie Wonder’s Eyes Only (Braille)”, “Liquor & Love Lost” (renamed “Dragon Slaying” in its “Repented” form) and particularly “A Lot Like Vegas” with its chantalong central hook, long dismissed as the products of unseasoned songwriters and musicians, prove themselves to be absolute killers in the live environment. It’s an unrelenting cascade of razor-barbed riffs as the spectres of All Shall Perish, The Black Dahlia Murder, At the Gates, and every other death metal and deathcore band that went into informing this sonic concoction are channelled and weaponised through Lee Malia’s sweep-picking solos and Matt Nicholls’ full speed double bass drums, both techniques they haven’t employed this much in an age yet pick up and unleash like men possessed.
Bring Me the Horizon | Photo by Nat Wood
On Oli Sykes’ part, the frontman is on the vocal form of his career, putting the work in and rising to meet the challenge of a full extreme-voiced set head-on with startlingly intensity. He’s throwing his hand out to passing fans for mic-grabs, making the most of this unique opportunity for an arena band to get this face-to-face with their audience, at one point bundling himself on top of a wall of them on stage with a flying leap. “I want this to be br00tal with two zeros!” is the real call that consecrates the love letter to a time in heavy music’s overall history that this is, an acknowledgement of the MySpace and basement deathcore era that here now has found its way to one of its biggest ever shows.
Count Your Blessings is wrapped up with the live premiere this weekend of “Dehumanized”, the brand new single added to the “Repented” version of the album, and Bring Me The Horizon’s ability to suddenly turn on this level of barbarity complete with multiple instantly devastating mosh calls cements the conviction with which this overall revisiting project for them has been driven.
Bring Me the Horizon | Photo by Nat Wood
After a brief pause, they’re back on stage, and the long-awaited dustings off of gems from their older catalogue doesn’t stop there. The monumental title track of “Suicide Season”, a major landmark in their progression of writing more emotionally weighty and grandiose material, is aired for the first time since 2011, whilst elusive “There is a Hell…” fan favourite “Blessed with a Curse” appears for only the second time this decade. They even go back further than “Count Your Blessings”, with the wonky panic chords of “Re: They Have No Reflections” from their debut “This is What the Edge of Your Seat Was Made For” EP screaming its way out there being played with pyro for an extra dose of the surreal.
When Oli prefaces a closing “Diamonds Aren’t Forever” with a declaration of love and brotherhood for his three bandmates and a humble reminder that they are from just down the A57 in Sheffield, England, it brings home what has been a total celebration not just of the scrappy deathcore debut album played by a bunch of hair farmers, but of the entire two decade plus journey that has led them back here.
