Chirp, chirp, derp. Hi, everyone. Bringthony, me, Tanno here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new Bring Me The Horizon album, Post Human: NeX GEn.

This is the seventh full-length LP from British loud rock outfit, Bring Me The Horizon, which is not just a follow-up to their 2019 record, amo. If we were to rewind to that point, we would be missing some important context because this record is really supposed to be the payoff, the start of a brand new era for the band, sonically and thematically, that was set up by a 32-minute EP they dropped back in 2020.

Maybe this doesn't mean much, given that I've never been a giant fan of the band. But in my eyes, this EP is the best thing the band has ever done because I never really had much love for the strain of metalcore and deathcore they originally broke onto the scene with in the 2000s. And while their 2010s work isn't exactly my cup of tea either, you could say the band survived the mainstream metalcore bubble popping by displaying enough talent and versatility to change with the times and bring songs with this revitalized and electronically enhanced take on alt metal and alt rock.

The band even showcased a knack for writing songs that had a more pop-friendly appeal on amo in 2019 that I referenced earlier. Many fans didn't care for that one too much, but the growing pains that came with that record, in my opinion, were all worth it for us to get this survival horror EP, which I went crazy for at the time. I even revisited it recently and it still bangs. It's everything a commercially appealing, modern, loud rock and metal record should be. It's in touch with its past, aware of the present, and also looking forward to the future with amazingly heavy, detailed, rich, harmonious production, mostly handled in-house by frontman Oli Sykes as well as Jordan Fish. Plus, composer Mick Gordon is in the mix on most of these tracks, too, who is pretty legendary for his multiple amazing video game soundtracks over the years.

There are lyrics all over this project dealing in dystopia, a dark, plagued future. Definitely a reflection of a lot of the anxieties people were feeling during the first year of the pandemic. The band not only had their finger on the pulse with this one, but also potentially the foresight and taste to help write the next chapter for mainstream rock music.

Even though this thing was an EP, short, seemingly a prequel to something else, Bring Me The Horizon really sounded like they had their sound figured out. And one could presume they would just strike while the iron is hot and drop their next album sooner rather than later. But Post Human: NeX GEn was actually several years after the release of Survival Horror. When I was listening to it, it was easy to hear why.

What happened with this thing? I thought we had this. I know Jordan Fish recently departed from the band, but that can't be the only reason this LP missed the mark. The production feels like a step down in clarity. The guitar smothers everything to the point where it kills any chance of this record sounding dynamic. I mean, there are portions of "Dig It," the track on the LP, for example, that between the guitars and the synths and the beats and the spacy vocals, it just sounds like static. Unlike Survival Horror, most of the attempts at working electronics into the mix on these tracks or song structures come across as tacky or basic. To be honest, I'm just not really enamored with the sound of this project at all.

I am really missing the cinematic flair that Mick Gordon's synths and beats brought to a lot of the tracks on Survival Horror. Without that theatrical sonic pretense, many of Bring Me the Horizon's homages to early and mid-2000s rock music, be that My Chemical Romance or Linkin Park, were watered down. I mean, for example, the song "Limousine" featuring Aurora, is literally just a frigging death tone song. Esthetically, anyway, it's crazy this record's themes are trying to sell us on this idea of what's next and futurism when most of the music on it sounds old as Rock. This record conceptually is supposed to be looking toward the future, and it had the potential to at least restore some faith in alt rock and alt metal's mainstream viability in the 2020s. What we actually got is just another piece of evidence that these genres, current day, are in a tailspin and have no idea what direction they should be going in. In a way, it reminds me of the way a lot of '80s hard rock and metal bands had a hard time finding their footing when transiting transitioning into the '90s, and grunge was bulldozing everything.

Except what's happening now is even more tragic because Bring Me The Horizon isn't even competing with some new wave of rock music. What they're doing instead is trying to survive through this power vacuum that's been left by rock's fall from grace commercially, which has led to bands and sounds and trends from 20 years ago being the most popular among rock fans today. I mean, in one breath, it's cool that a lot of of these records and artists are getting a critical reassessment because during their heyday, they were often slagged as being lame and way less cool than a lot of the more underground stuff going on at the time. It's awesome that without forcing it, Deftones have found an audience with a new generation of listeners.

With that being said, I really don't need Bring Me the Horizon to give me what it would sound like if Chino and the boys tried to write an anthem that would appeal to Christian youth ministers on utopia. So that's how the record is falling short, esthetically, sonically, contextually. But also, as far as the lyrics go, I feel like the sights were being set much higher on survival horror than they are on NeX GEn.

While you do get some tracks here and there that deal in futurism and a cold, harsh tech dystopia, the attempts at digging deeper into that angle come across as shallow or even vague. It feels like the band doesn't really have anything additionally to say post-survival horror, but they're going through the motions of making this record anyway. The only way the commentary on this record could be more vapid is if it were a Muse album or, I don't know, a Ted Talk where Grimes is talking about uploading her personality to the cloud.

As far as the lyrical focus on this record goes, most of it is actually just Oli Sykes just wallowing and snarkly reveling in self-loathing with no real arc or growth or depth across the LP, which just serves as a reminder that self-hatred and self-absorption are actually just two sides of the same coin. There are only a few tracks in the mix here, honestly, that feel like a successful continuation of what survival horror set up sonically, stylistically, thematically. There's "Amen" with Lil Uzi Vert, for example, which was a pretty strong single to the record. A chaotic and exciting metal rap hybrid that's all about end times and has a super epic musical presentation to it as well.

But apparently, the band couldn't really keep this up for the rest of the album. But yeah, ultimately, I feel like the hard pill to swallow with this LP is that whatever potential Bring Me the Horizon had with this sound and this lyrical concept, they pretty much unloaded the clip on Survival Horror with almost nothing left in the chamber when they went to go drop this, which is why I'm feeling a light 3 on this record.

Anthony Fantano, Bring Me the Horizon of Forever.