amo

Amo is the sound of Bring Me the Horizon deciding that heaviness no longer needs to be measured by the amount of metal in a song. The band’s sixth studio album keeps distorted guitars and hard-rock scale available when useful, but throws them into a much broader palette of electronic rock, pop, electropop and alternative music. Instead of protecting an established identity, Oli Sykes and Jordan Fish use production itself as a way of testing how far the group can move without losing emotional intensity.

The album was produced by Sykes and Fish and written and recorded primarily in Los Angeles, with additional work in Sheffield. Its title is the Portuguese word for “I love”, an apt choice for a record preoccupied with different forms of attachment, desire and damage. Promotion began cryptically, with billboards carrying the lyric “Do you wanna start a cult with me?” before “Mantra” formally introduced the project. Sykes warned that the single was not representative of the entire album and that every song was different, which proved unusually accurate advertising.

“Medicine” is startlingly bright by the band’s earlier standards, while “Nihilist Blues”, featuring Grimes, leans deep into electronics and dance music. “Wonderful Life” brings Dani Filth into a heavier setting, and “Mother Tongue” pushes towards direct pop. The point is not that Bring Me the Horizon abandoned rock, but that they stopped treating genre boundaries as obligations. The contrasts can be sharp, yet Fish’s programming and Sykes’s vocal presence give the album a recognisable internal logic.

Released on 25 January 2019, Amo received strong reviews and was later nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album. More importantly, it confirmed that the band’s evolution from deathcore roots into a far broader modern-rock vocabulary was not a temporary detour. Amo rewards listeners willing to let the sequence change the rules from track to track. Its ambition lies not in being everything at once, but in refusing to assume that yesterday’s version of Bring Me the Horizon has veto power over tomorrow’s.