“I wasn’t feeling any better and I was like, ‘That’s why I was writing about this stuff in the first place.’ I was worried about it, it was scaring me, I needed to process it. But after a period of reflection, the band returned to the song, almost out of duty, realising that sitting and watching Netflix wasn’t improving the situation. Leaving the song for a few weeks, Oli was struggling to be productive or creative as he was so focussed on the world and its future. “We already decided that we wanted to show the world this song first, then we were like, ‘Is this going to be perceived in bad taste?’ People are dying every day and this song is talking about a pandemic, it’s talking about death and paranoia, so we shelved it for a bit.” “As things started rapidly unfolding it was like, ‘Oh shit, this might be too close to the bone,’” he recalls.
PARASITE EVE BMTH TV
He explains how “weird” it felt that his lyrics were mirroring the TV news, so much so that they initially put a stop to the song’s production. The name Parasite Eve comes from a 1998 survival-horror PlayStation game, a title Oli wanted to use before coronavirus really took hold. It freaked me out and I thought, ‘Is that our future? Is our future going to be us fighting invisible wars?’” “Not that I think COVID-19 is anything to do with climate change, but it’s obviously to do with us getting closer to nature and animal life and deforestation – it’s happening because of the way we’re living. They reckoned it was to do with the world heating up and it was becoming heat-resistant and there’s still no cure for it, it’s killing people in quite hefty numbers. “I went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading about stuff and there was an article about this superbug in Japan that was resistant to all treatments that usually combat it. England should not be 35✬,” Oli remembers today, still with an air of panic in his voice. In fact, the idea came from last summer on the hottest day of the year. While not directly inspired by COVID-19, BMTH’s new track Parasite Eve does come from a fear of humanity’s survival.
“Coming from a world where you think you need to be in a studio to get the best sounds, it’s almost like this thing no-one wanted you to know,” laughs Oli today, speaking to Kerrang! from his home in Sheffield. They could take breaks easily, Jordan could be with his young family rather than travelling up north to write, and they could still be creative. Working over Skype and Zoom, with Oli in his home vocal booth and the rest of the band in their set-ups, it became clear that expensive studios in far-flung places weren’t actually necessary. But, forever looking forward, the five-piece embraced the opportunity to work remotely. Earlier this year, frontman Oli Sykes and keyboardist Jordan Fish decamped to Amsterdam to start writing with the idea of releasing something this summer, but as global circumstances changed, so did the band’s plans. Officially one of UK rock’s biggest bands, with festival headline slots and a Number One album under their belts, there has been much speculation about the direction BMTH would go in next.Īnd then they dropped Parasite Eve, the first fruit from the Yorkshire heavyweights’ lockdown sessions. Despite 2019 being a prolific year for Bring Me The Horizon (the release of amo, the Music To… surprise EP, and Ludens' inclusion on the Death Stranding soundtrack), the notion of new material is always cause for celebration.