More about: Bring Me The Horizon

"This show sold out in two fucking hours," squawks Oli Sykes to a sea of pumping fists at London's Alexandra Palace, "this is the best show of our fucking lives."

No one has had a year quite like Bring Me The Horizon. They came quite close to blowing Metallica off the stage at Reading + Leeds, before sizing up their odds of headlining in the near future. Free of his demons and drug addiction, Sykes vowed to 'turn grief into gold'. The result was the huge That's The Spirit - gatecrashing the album chart at No.2

With news of the band announcing a huge show at the iconic Royal Albert Hall with an orchestra next year, the Sheffield metal heroes are in town for an epic round at the fittingly majestic Ally Pally. Will this be their crowning moment? Well, if there's one thing that we've learned from Bring Me The Horizon in 2015, it's that if they believe something enough, they can make it happen. Make it so, BMTH.  

Always with their heart on their sleeves, Bring Me The Horizon have made no secret of wanting bring rock back to the masses - and having metal rule the airwaves like in the halcyon days of Linkin Park and Slipknot being at the peak of their powers at the turn of the century. They may not be the biggest band in the world, but they could certainly convince you that they are. 

Arriving on stage to the ominous electro-lead menace of That's The Spirit's elegiac heart 'Doomed', the band stalk the multi-tiered stage of LED screens and headline-worthy blockbuster visuals before the song erupts in its industrial climax. 'S.P.I.R.I.T - spirit, let's hear it' commands the voice-over before launching into the radio dominating 'Happy Song'. The feral and unified response screams that Bring Me effortlessly made a modern rock anthem. This moment in their timeline makes perfect sense - this was always part of their design.  

While peaks come from Sempiternal's epic 'Go to Hell, for Heaven's Sake' and 'Shadow Moses' and the seldom showcase of earlier material with 'Chelsea Smile' and 'Blessed With A Curse', it's 'True Friends', 'Drown' and the more open nature of the newer stuff that holds the show together. The thrashier moments are welcomed as familiar old friends, but the band need not hide behind speed and aggression to still prove to be intense. They cut straight to the core of what helps the masses lose their minds, and now that they're so totally free from the shackles and confines of any genre, they've shifted shape into something that can really take flight. 

That's The Spirit may have proven divisive among their old faithful, but they've opened themselves to mean something so much larger to so many more. Whether they'll become everything they've always threatened to be remains to be seen. The set may be short, the production overblown, but all the smoke and mirrors in the world can't conjure up the fact that the world is in the palm of their hand.

The crowd so often drowns out the band, and the sheer scale of what they pull off is a short-sharp showcase of them taking no prisoners in fulfilling their own prophecy. This is the very physical manifestation of their ambitions. The horizon may well be theirs. The best night of their fucking lives is just the beginning.  

Bring Me The Horizon played:
Doomed
Happy Song
Go to Hell, for Heaven's Sake
The House of Wolves
Chelsea Smile
Throne
Shadow Moses
Sleepwalking
True Friends
Can You Feel My Heart
Antivist
Encore:
Blessed with a Curse
Drown

More about: Bring Me The Horizon