Bring Me the Horizon @ OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 14 Jan

In a scene of bands stuck in the same gear, Sheffield’s Bring Me the Horizon have long been unafraid to delve into seemingly scary new sounds. In their two decades together, Oli Sykes and his merry band of misfits have made a significant jump from being a shouty metalcore outfit to becoming a shouty metalcore outfit that pushes all sorts of boundaries, changing perceptions of what’s possible in heavy music. 

So much so, that a headline arena tour across the UK is no longer a surprise – alas, it’s the most fitting stage for one of rock’s biggest bands. Despite a challenging end to 2023 – with news of long-standing bandmate and lynchpin, Jordan Fish, departing the band, and the announcement of another delay to the release of their new album, POST HUMAN: NeX GEn – they’re fired up to kick off the year as they mean to go on. 

For starters, they’ve brought along arguably the heavy music lineup of the year (and we’re only 14 days into January!), with three of the best up-and-comers in the scene in Static Dress, Cassyette and recently appointed alt-internet sensations, Bad Omens. This is a bill to make any metal lover’s mouth water – and with the energy and verve each band brings to their respective sets, the crowd is quickly stoked from lukewarm to piping hot by the time Bring Me emerge. 

A 90s video game loading screen appears on-screen ready to launch us into the ‘Bring Me the Horizon Experience' – after 15 minutes of waiting for someone to finally press start on their controller, that is. “Let’s tear this place a new arsehole!”, Sykes so delicately beckons, orchestrating the cacophony of screaming souls below him to split the room in half as they race through a vicious front three of DArkSide, Empire (Let Them Sing), and MANTRA. The newer POST HUMAN-era songs like AmEN! and Teardrops are razor-sharp alongside the more established (and far less frequent) arena anthems like Shadow Moses. Typically, nostalgia is the currency of fans in the alternative scene, but you couldn’t hear a complaint about new tracks over the noise tonight.  

As the disturbingly baby-faced CGI monster Angel Dust wrecks the church-like stage BMTH stand upon for Kool-Aid, you can’t help but be taken aback by the sheer scale of the show at hand. The visuals, the storyboarding, and Christ!, the performance, are all so spectacularly crafted – it feels like a set that's been years in the making.

Kingslayer is a raucous riot and an undoubted highlight of the night, while the acoustic performance of sTraNgeRs is a curveball that peels back the band’s skin to reveal the hidden beauty they so rarely bare. Despite a couple of momentum-halting pauses to safely recover a few hurt members of the crowd, cult classic Antivist sees Bad Omens vocal behemoth Noah Sebastian join Sykes for a voice box-shredding performance that could quite possibly break emo Twitter. Elsewhere, Drown sees Sykes plunge into the crowd with camera in hand to capture the completion of a few front-row fans' dreams – queue tears, smiles, signs and, of course, screams. 

As a touching montage of the band’s last 20 years of misadventures plays through the pre-encore, you’re reminded just how far these screamy upstarts have come to be such champions of the scene they now rule over. Finally, the emphatic colossus of Throne brings the night to a close, with confetti bursts, flame cannons, and monumental moshpits smashing the place to pieces one last time. Make no mistake, this is a band who are absolutely at the peak of the powers.