In 2019, Oli Sykes predicted “some fokin” mental catastrophe for years … we are literally, don’t you think so? “He imagined a tsunami or a volcano.
His words range from Underground Big, his band takes me to The Horizon’s 24 minute track and the first of Cassandra’s two predictions of the stadium rock. He received a song about the epidemic with Parasite Eve for the second time. “I read about this superbug in Japan that was killing a lot of people, and the article said that it would be the next war mankind will face,” he says now. “I didn’t think it would come this year.”
People started dying as soon as they caught Kovid-19, the band sang their unpublished song. “I thought it was a video game, behaving like a fantasy – and someone could hear it and they would just lose their grandparents,” Sykes said. But the band thought again: “Probably all of these people need a cathartic experience. There’s no one to write a song about – and we’ve got one. That’s how people and rock music will help people process dark things right now.”
Parasitic Eve was released in June and became the first great part of the industry about epidemics. The instability of dramatic developments such as sirens, sneezes, and sensitive cyborg-overlord voices, swaying from whispers to giant cords – provokes the 2020 defined chaos that kes “don’t know their donkeys from their pathogens” and asks when we go: Remember the lesson? “
The song includes Brad Me The Horizon’s new EP Post Human: Survival Horror, which features bright apocalyptic pop with boyband-style melodies. Seven of the nine tracks were made full time and are often lockeddown; New single teardrops, over which Sykes shouts “Oh my God, everything is so bad!” Inspired by Rolling News at the time of the epidemic with the epidemic of terror, “How can we infect ourselves with it every day and be addicted to it”.
Band members have collaborated across Zoom and FaceTime apart from each other. It is practical and aesthetically pleasing to create them with “cyberpunk metal” software. “Our last album, Amo, of course we spent a few thousand bucks to make it and we made this new one for something,” Sykes says.
That 2018 album was their sixth since being formed in Sheffield in 2009 and their first UK No. 1 and two Grammy nominations. Its slick pop was far away from their roots, while the Sykes roared wildly at the fad hole and stop-start rhythm. His passage from the gentle chorus to pop the melody reflects his own progress through a hellish childhood, addiction and divorce.
We talk through it in the vegan bar that is under the office of his own clothing company, Drop Dead, in Sheffield. The tattoos cover his arms and are wrapped around his face, as if he were just placing them in the bay. He now grows up in Stokesbridge, a small South Yorkshire town between Sheffield and Huddersfield, 33. “I had school poke bags,” he says. “Literally. I have to spread my shit at the end of 11 pranks every year. It would start with beating me up as a kid, to everyone. [it was] It was planted in me that everyone was living with me. “
The frustration was the crest for his new band, who built a dedicated following throughout their first three albums built unknown to these fans, Sykes suffered from uninterrupted ADHD and developed an addiction to ketamine. He poured the experience into the band’s 2013 major-label breakthrough sempiternal, telling listeners at an awards ceremony the following year: “When I came out of rehabilitation I didn’t want to shout anymore, I wanted to sing from the roof of the choir.”
Her voice has been further strengthened in 2016’s Anthemic The Spirit, which just didn’t clear up at No. 1 (“We were so drunk, head over to our drinks, like: Bloody stereophonics”), but the album took a year on the charts and Wembley Arena did them. Sykes, soon after, faced a new trauma: his first wife cheated on him. He later accused Sykes of his own blasphemy and slapped and spat on him.
She denies it all. “I said, ‘I love you, but I can’t do it anymore.’ I kept my cool so much … came out and drew me as an offensive person, it was incredible. However, he said: “I was in a relationship where I cheated on another person – I’m not always a saint. [his ex-wife] He was having a really hard time when that happened, so there was always more concern about him than hatred. The night I found out was such a dark time. This goes beyond my anger, this person’s safety. “
“After spitting on a heavy guitar, I thought I had made a bad wish, but I don’t,” said Sykes. He also met his second wife, Alyssa Souls. “We never argue. It is extremely loving, compassionate, free and faithful. People are in an abusive relationship, whether emotional or physical, because they think: ‘This is love, love is tough,’ but in that mythical, perfect, idealistic thing, it’s not even imagined: you just found the right person. “
The more secure Sykes began to write optimistic songs, but then, as soon as the lockdown began, his concerns at school resurfaced. “My normalcy was showing to thousands of people. That world relieved the darkness. When it was all over, I felt a little out of place. ”She had her first therapy session, and her doctor linked her to the trauma of Sykes’s playground with her” tendency to believe that everyone thinks the worst of me. The next time I start thinking negatively. ” , I like: Wait a minute, your brain does it automatically. “
Yet, as the world got heavier, so did the band’s music. “At first I was like this: ‘I get sick and wear pajamas every day,'” Sykes said. “But after a while, things like that start to make you feel submissive. When people are dying, you’re playing monopoly there.” A stern punk reggae about the plight, including “The sky is breaking / being very annoying.” And the parasitic eve has a line, “Life is a prison and death is a door,” which Sykes says he can’t get out during the epidemic. What could send the wrong message to a weak audience? “You always run the risk when you write the kind of thing I’m writing,” he says. Or the glory of it … this special thing makes me feel. “
The synthetic sound of My Bring Horizon evokes a suffocating digital existence; Sykes says he has created an addiction to his phone lockdown. And the roaring voice came back, but where his anger was once about himself, now it’s about everything else. “With this record, there’s something to shout about,” he continued. “I feel angry আমি I was torn by the way I dressed, but I always had the freedom to do it. Although there are still people who are driven to be born every day, be it their skin color or their sexual preferences.
Sykes had already made fairly jokes about politics and society. He did not vote in the last election, Jeremy Corbyn said, “He made the line between what he wanted to do, what he wanted to do and what he said – but he had an innate faith in the British government.” “For example, they may not always make the right decisions, but they are not inherently bad. I got this feeling from America. Every man for himself, this is the American dream, although in England it seemed that there was more camerawork. “However, he says, in something like the friendship between Jeffrey Appstein and Prince Andrew,” you see this corruption going on. “He wonders,” With the lockdown, are they really trying to do the best for us? ” Travel corridors, for example: What’s going on: Give us a good Brexit deal? It’s harder now to show them as an unconditional caretaker government. “
Victims of a decade of austerity may wonder what took him so long? Sykes says he has been “arrogant and complacent” about his political involvement in the past: “Before I used to use my Buddhism, ‘Well, I do my job for the world.'” He emphasized the lack of faith in science during the climate crisis. “I’m a bit pessimistic, but what I hope is – well, not hope, because it sounds bad – but something really bad is about to happen. Where we have not been wiped out, it is enough to come back because that is what people are seeing. “
Do we need anything worse than coronavirus? “Unfortunately, for mankind to wake up. We have to come out of our divisions and victories … We don’t like to fragment or bend our reality. But you have to keep your brain soft and dirty. “
He uses the Black Lives Matter movement as an example. “Your first persuasion is when someone calls you a racist: ‘No, I’m not fucking.’ But if you listen and take your ego out of the equation… because you don’t know how systems are built in all ways. It’s the same for everything in life. “
After years of personal turmoil, Sykes has had an equally tumultuous political awakening. “Whether it’s love or government, you have to make better demands,” he began to separate the signal from the noise.
Human Post Human: The panic of survival is out now