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If you’d asked 20 years ago, the only people who could genuinely have seen Bring Me The Horizon someday headlining a major US festival would be the band themselves. Their cocksure swagger might’ve once been dismissed as arrogance, but two decades’ worth of continual escalation to the point they comfortably pack out arenas and effectively re-shaped modern metalcore with 2013’s Sempiternal has done a lot to prove their ambition wasn’t unwarranted.
Now they’re here: Temple Stage headliners at Sonic Temple, greeting a near-packed Historic Crew Stadium with a crowd that easily rivals that of My Chemical Romance’s sold-out Thursday performance. And they absolutely crush it. Bring Me’s brand of theatricality might be more coded to post-modernism and video game culture than My Chem’s, but its no less effective.
The Metal Gear Solid-style codec conversations with Eve and M8 add a weird, surreal atmosphere to the band’s performance and make it feel like everything is part of some grand, anime-inspired sci-fi adjacent narrative, not hurt in the least by cameras that follow the band as they play and distort their images Matrix-style.
All that’s before we even get onto the show itself. “Are you ready?!” Oli Sykes snarls, the carpet of human flesh now making up the floor of the stadium breaking up into rapid moving cyclones as BMTH kick off with Darkside. For all that they’ve effectively graduated from the confines of metalcore, the hallmarks of that sound are all polished to an absurd degree in just about every song in the set. The House Of Wolves, Mantra, Happy Song and Shadow Moses are undeniable anthems and elicit some of the loudest sing-alongs we’ve heard all weekend.
Oli Sykes doesn’t dial back on the distinctly British banter when egging the crowd on - “If you won’t jump to this one, you’re a fucking knob.” “If you don’t move, you’re in the Epstein files. Nobody wants that!” - a subtle reminder Bring Me got to this point by not following anybody else and proudly displaying their own character.
The enormous production (streamers, pyro, dancers) is almost secondary to the sense this band have basically become not just the measuring stick of modern metal success, but the band the mainstream metal world has effectively been chasing for over a decade - and a nice guest spot from viral metal singer Maphra for Doomed shows they've still got their finger well on the pulse. A video reel of their past highlights just how far they've come to get here, surpassing just about every other British metal band not called “Iron Maiden”. By this point, that early arrogance is looking more like foresight.
