7 Things You Need To Know About Bring Me The Horizon's New Album 'amo', According To Jordan Fish

Happy amo release day Bring Me The Horizon stanners! The Sheffield metalcore graduates’ mega-hyped follow-up to their 2015 LP That’s The Spirit has landed in all of its polarisingly pop-infused glory.

As well as the requisite hard-riffing rock anthems, this disc is packing soulful electro-pop bops and beat-switching EDM bangers and tbh we’re really looking forward to kicking back and watching the inevitable fan brawls break out across social media like:

But first, to celebrate this absolute blockbuster of a release, we caught up with Bring Me’s resident keyboard wrangler / secret weapon and all around songwriting genius-in-chief Jordan Fish to brief us on some important FYI’s about the trailblazing rockers’ sixth LP.

Check out 7 things you need to know about amo below, and remember you can also catch BMTH live when they return to Australia this April to perform a trio of headlining dates across Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne!

1. They’re not intentionally trying to piss fans off by changing up their sound

“I’m assuming [some fans will be pissed],” Jordan confesses. “But I’m not really prepared for it. We’ll have to take it when it comes I guess? I don’t know.”

According to Fish, the band’s goal with this record is “the same as it’s been every time”, which is actually to “make an album that people like,” he chuckles.

“And one that has an emotional connection that people enjoy and people find to be interesting and deep.”

Fish adds that BMTH didn’t want to make the kind of album that you throw on once and go “yeah, that was decent” and then forget about.

“It’s an album that has depth to it and rewards repeat listens, at least for me,” he explains. “As a band, we definitely wanted to push ourselves and kind of show more of our influences and prove that we can be bolder and take more risks than we’ve done before.”

2. But they are trying to find a way to make rock music “feel fresh” again

“For us, we don’t listen to rock music often,” Fish admits. “Because we don’t feel like there’s that much stuff that’s fresh and exciting. So we’ve been trying to find some new gaps in between genres that feel like they work with what they’ve done before and try to create a sound that’s new, basically. That’s the main goal anyway.”

But, he adds, they’re not really that hung up on the whole “rock” tag.

“In reality we don’t really care what rock music is or isn’t… I don’t think it’s shite, I just think it’s not been willing to move outside of its [box], so it’s become a bit of a niche, retro-y kind of genre.”

Fish says that Bring Me The Horizon are more interested in taking “what we’ve done before and moving to a place where we don’t feel restricted, and we don’t feel like we have to play festivals where we’re playing with a bunch of bands that we don’t relate to.

“Like on the last touring cycle [for That’s The Spirit], we were playing these festivals where we would, like, look weird? Do you know what I mean? We’d be the only band not wearing, like, leather jackets and skinny jeans looking like a band from, like, a movie about a rock band. [amo‘s sound] has partly been born from us feeling like we don’t really relate to that.”

“We are aware that we do come from that rock/metal background, but we do kind of feel a little bit out on our own,” he reflects. “I don’t feel like there’s many other bands really trying to do [something new]. If you look at, like, the early to mid 2000’s, I would say that was the last time that rock music was last in the mainstream — it was nu-metal, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit — all these bands that were in the charts and going to the VMA’s and were just huge bands at that time… and I feel like that hasn’t really happened since. And I don’t think it’s necessarily going to happen again because there were a huge wave of bands at that time.

“I think a ‘scene’ is quite important for young music fans to get into,” Fish continues. “And I think that’s what you see now with people who listen to, like, Travis Scott and Post Malone. There’s a load of artists to get into, there’s not just one. They can get into Drake and then they can move into J. Cole or whatever — there’s like a whole big world of music for people to get into.

“Whereas, I think, where we are, I don’t think there are many other bands who are trying to push themselves into a new type of rock music, at least not yet. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing for us — that no one else is really doing it — or whether it’s a really bad thing for us. Because if there’s not a bunch of bands pushing things forward for young people to get into then they’re gonna stop coming to shows. And you can see that at festivals now — like, you go to Reading Festival which was traditionally kind of like a Soundwave-style rock festival, nowadays when the rock bands go and play there not many of them go down well. Mostly people turn up for, like, Skepta and the urban music, hip-hop and grime .

“I don’t know what the answer is, but for us, we’re on our own path I think. And we try to only really look at us, because that’s really the only thing that we can worry about.”

3. There’s a song on the album called ‘Heavy Metal’ that addresses head-on the phenomenon of people having a cry over the band’s new musical direction

“But some kid on the ‘Gram in a Black Dahlia tank says it ain’t heavy metal…”

“It’s the first time we’ve ever done kind of like a self-referential song, ” Fish explains. “It came quite late on and I guess we’d run out of things to write about [laughs] and Oli just decided we needed to write a song about us — and where we were at and the kinds of things that were, like, in our heads when we’re writing and, partly, the kinds of things that people assume are in our heads. Some of it’s true and some of it’s not really true. There’s some references to, like, the label telling us what to do, which is not really true. I guess it’s more like us thinking about the kinds of things that we should be doing, versus the kinds of things that we wanna do, versus the kinds of things that our fans want us to do or the kinds of things that, at least, we think our fans want us to do.

“So it’s more just about the headfuck of writing an album and all the different opinions and things that go through your mind,” he continues. “Especially for us, because obviously we’re an unusual band and we sound very different to how we used to sound. So yeah, it’s just a tongue-in-cheek song really. And I guess it’s as close as you can get to a response [to the haters] or kind of a way of preempting anyone who’s gonna [have a whinge].”

4. If amo inspires a bunch of shitty rip-offs, BMTH are sorry

Addressing the so-called “Bring Me The Horizon Effect” that was coined after That’s The Spirit inspired numerous other heavy bands to chase a more mainstream-friendly sound (but perhaps with not-so-great results) Fish laughs: “Terrible. That’s terrible news. What have we done? We’re responsible for something so terrible.”

5. amo the next step in their masterplan to become like Nine Inch Nails, Tool or Radiohead

“I guess I see us going down that road,” Fish muses, but he doesn’t necessarily mean in terms of sound.

“We want to end up in a place where we can just do our own thing and we have our own fanbase. Tool, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead are the kind of bands where they can all do what they want, and their fans are there because they have a proven track record of being good. I’d like us to get to a point where we can just do what we want. I think we’re kind of getting there now, not that we’re as big as Radiohead. But that would be good.”

6. A children’s choir features on the song ‘why you gotta kick me when i’m down?’

“It’s a choir from my local village where I live,” Fish grins. “I went to the primary school and recorded a bunch of eight-year-olds. And they’re on there!”

7. The accompanying live show will be part mosh, part dance party

“Yeah, our production’s quite minimal and clean and industrial-looking at the moment,” Fish says of the band’s forthcoming Australian tour. “So I think we’re gonna keep going down that road and go fully cyber with it. Maybe lasers. Yeah, I like that, I think we’re all into that vibe. Full rave vibe.”

But that doesn’t mean they won’t be blasting fans with some of their more vintage pit-thrillers.

“The set’s probably going to be a little long for us,” Fish laughs. “Buy yeah, we’ll still be playing a lot of the ones that people wanna hear. This last tour we’ve been doing this, like, old school medley of songs from like way before I was in the band basically. I don’t really do anything I just stand there and headbang for like six minutes. We might be doing that! I’m not sure, we’ll see how it goes. At the moment I think we’re planning on keeping it in cause it’s good fun. We’ll see.”

He adds: “On this last tour we played something like six songs off Sempiternal which, considering it’s like years old, is still a decent amount.”

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Bring Me The Horizon’s new album ‘amo’ is out now! Grab it here.