Bring Me The Horizon Went Back and Rebuilt Count Your Blessings, and It Actually Works

When I heard Bring Me The Horizon were re-recording Count Your Blessings for its 20th anniversary, I was genuinely hyped. A lot of re-recordings feel like a cash grab or a band quietly rewriting their own history, but this was one I actually wanted. The original is a monster, and the idea of BMTH going back to it with everything they have learned in the two decades since sounded sick. So the real question was never whether I wanted it. It was whether Count Your Blessings | Repented could live up to the version I had already built up in my head. Mostly, it does.

Here's the thing about the 2006 original: everybody who loves it also kind of admits it sounds like it was recorded in a shed. That was part of the charm, sure, but the band always said the budget and an unfamiliar producer boxed them in. So Oli Sykes and Lee Malia went back in with producer Buster Odeholm and rebuilt the thing from the ground up, and the difference hits you immediately.

The production is the whole point

This is where Repented earns it. Pray For Plagues and Black & Blue come back armour-plated, heavier and meaner than the versions burned into your brain from 2006. Nineteen-year-old me would have lost it over this mix. The riffs land like they were always supposed to, the drums actually hit, and the deathcore bones of the record finally sound as vicious as they were written to be. There's also a brand new closing track that quietly proves BMTH can still write this style at will, which, coming from the band that has spent the last decade making pop records with orchestras, is a genuinely cool flex.

What it can't fix

Here's the honest part, and every review I read landed in the same place. You can polish the sound all you want, but you can't rewrite the songs, and Count Your Blessings was always a young band leaning hard on breakdown after breakdown. Cleaner production actually exposes that a little. A few of these tracks, weirdly, hit harder in their scrappy original form, because some of that raw teenage chaos got sanded down in the upgrade. And despite the whole Repented framing, and Oli hinting in interviews that he might revisit the lyrics that people have called out over the years, those lyrics are still here, untouched. Make of that what you will, but do not go in expecting an apology record.

So is it worth it

If you have zero attachment to the original, this probably reads as a solid, punishing deathcore record and not much more. But if Count Your Blessings meant something to you, and for a whole generation of heavy kids it absolutely did, Repented is the version you always heard in your head. The wild part is how it plays. Putting this on does not feel like a nostalgia trip or a victory lap. It feels like discovering the whole thing all over again, like hearing these songs for the first time with fresh ears, except now they hit with the weight you always wished they had. Same beloved, messy, ridiculous, important little record, just finally given the muscle it deserved.

Twenty years later and BMTH still know exactly where they came from. Go turn Pray For Plagues up way too loud and thank them for it.

Live photo by @devilman.138.