Bring Me The Horizon Repent on Count Your Blessings, and Black & Blue Proves the Point
Bring Me The Horizon have spent the better part of two decades keeping Count Your Blessings at arm’s length. Not the songs, it turns out, the sound. Now they have gone back and re-recorded the whole debut, and the first piece of evidence is a brand new version of Black & Blue. It is the same track you screamed yourself hoarse to in 2006, finally built the way they always wanted it.
The record they were never happy with
For years the assumption was that the band hated this album. Oli Sykes says that was never it. “I think a lot of people think that we hate that record or are embarrassed about it, cause we don’t play it and stuff, but really we were just always disappointed with how it sounded.” They walked out of the studio in 2006 deflated, and Sykes pins it on a producer who simply was not an extreme metal guy. Worth remembering the context too. They were barely out of their teens, they tracked their parts separately rather than in a room together, and the original Count Your Blessings limped in at number 93 on the UK chart and split rooms down the middle. This was the bottled-at-Reading era. The distance was always about the mix, never the material.
What Repented actually does to Black & Blue
The new Black & Blue keeps the grit and the bad intentions and rebuilds everything around them. NME called it “stadium-friendly, grandiose production” that pushes the song into “epic horizons.” Wall of Sound said it sounds “crispy and not so rough on the ears,” with riffs that are “much more palatable than the first issuing.” The detail that matters most: Oli re-recorded his growls from scratch. He had to relearn the old technique to do it, joking that it “took me a minute to work out how to do some of this shit again.” It is the same screams with twenty years of touring lungs behind them. Mixed by Buster Odeholm of Thrown and Vildhjarta, a modern heavy-music guy who is the exact opposite of the original problem.
Old versus new, honestly
The 2006 Black & Blue is a time capsule. Thin, brittle, a little charming in how scrappy it is, the sound of kids figuring it out in real time. The re-record is the same skeleton with actual muscle on it. The low end hits, the parts separate instead of smearing together, and the screams land where they used to fray. This is not a reinvention. They did not drag it into the POST HUMAN era or smooth it into something it never was. They kept the song and fixed the room it was recorded in. Whether that reads as “better” or just “different” is the debate already kicking off, and honestly that is the fun of it. If you loved the raw version for its rough edges, you will clock what is gone. If you always wished it hit the way this band hits live now, this is the one you have been waiting for.
What’s coming
Black & Blue is the first single from Count Your Blessings | Repented, the full 20th anniversary re-recording, out July 10. They are playing the album front to back at Manchester’s B.E.C. Arena on July 10 and 11 for Outbreak, with a stacked heavy bill including Static Dress, Dying Wish, Rolo Tomassi and Heriot, and they close Furnace Fest in Birmingham, Alabama on October 11 performing the record in full. All of this while the POST HUMAN: NeX GEn touring keeps rolling. For a band that spent years acting like this album barely existed, putting it back on a stage in full is about as full-circle as it gets.
Go stream Black & Blue, pre-order Repented, and if you can get to Manchester or Furnace Fest, go watch them repent in person.