Bring Me The Horizon frontman Oli Sykes recently had a chat with NME about headlining for Download Festival. The festival welcomes many rock and metal bands every year, and though the band performed at the festival before, this year was their first time playing as the headline band. Sykes told NME:
“People have spoken about us headlining the festival for a few years now but we’ve never been so sure. Now we’re here, it’s weird and I’m nervous but I also feel very confident in being a headline band.”
Sykes wants the band to be heard, which he expressed like so:
“[…] We want to prove ourselves, we want to blow everyone else out the water and we want to make sure people walk away going, ‘F*cking hell, they are a headline band’.[…]”
After being told many times that the band is not good anymore due to the change of their sound over the years, Download Festival was the ‘stamp of approval’ for them. The frontman explained:
“There’s just something about headlining Download that feels like a stamp of approval from the rock and metal community. The fact we’re going to have 80,000 people celebrating our band is f*cked. There were a couple of years where it felt like I was trying to get my band out [of that world] and where rock felt a little dead. Now, I’m so proud to be a part of this.”
Bring Me The Horizon has been making music since 2006, and the changes in the albums’ concepts, sounds, and lyrics seem to have disappointed the fans. In an interview that happened in 2016, the band told even if they play in bigger festivals and tours, they would still get hate for it. Sykes, in the interview, said:
“We still got booed. Then again, years ago we’d be getting boos and getting into fights with people in the crowd at our own headline shows. It’s like, ‘You paid to be here, there’s no one on after us and you’re still throwing sh*t at us!”
In the same interview, the guitarist Lee Malia told:
“Even if the whole crowd booed, we’d still play a full set. We’ve got nowt to be ashamed of! We haven’t done anything wrong, we’ve never changed, we’ve not jumped on any bandwagon, so we’ll just do what we do. That’s all we can do.”
The band is now getting prepared to release their new studio album, ‘Post Human: NeX GEn’. A few singles have already been released, including many other names such as Blackbear, Lil Uzi Vert, and Daryl Palumbo.
You can see the band’s Download performance down below.