Bring Me The Horizon‘s Oli Sykes and Architects‘ Sam Carter both recently sat down for a joint interview together with Kerrang! with much of the discussion focusing on the current state of the metal/rock scene. With Bring Me The Horizon‘s latest album “amo” having been a divisive step for the band, finding the group moving even further away from their heavier origins, the topic of experimenting and pushing yourself as a musician came about. Speaking on blurring the genre lines and branching out as a musician, the pair had the following to say:
Carter: “…After you’ve been in a band 13, 14 years, you can piss out a heavy record (laughs)! You can’t go in and just chug, it’s boring. Push yourself. Don’t do something that’s safe, because eventually you’ll lose that excited feeling you used to get from writing music.”
Sykes: “I appreciate that as a kid that it’s hard to understand that your tastes evolve. When I was 16, all I wanted was fast heaviness, and I couldn’t imagine myself growing out of that. And I haven’t grown out of it, but your palate just changes. I think what you have to do is be a band that surpasses a genre. Look at all the most successful bands: Linkin Park were a heavy band for people who don’t like heavy bands. Arctic Monkeys are an indie band for people who don’t like indie. I hate indie, but I love Arctic Monkeys. Architects – loads of people don’t like heavy music or metal, but love Architects.”
They also spoke of how embracing other genres can bring in new ears and help benefit the scene, even though artists that do are often met with resistance from the more vocal fans of their earlier works. Regarding that, the pair had the following to say:
Sykes: “I mean, that’s the problem with the metal community and the rock community. They want to keep it to themselves. They don’t like the idea of other people coming in and enjoying just a bit of it. When ‘amo‘ came out we had so much support from every other band, and the way I saw it was people going, ‘Yes! They’ve done something different – we wanna do that, too.’ But I’d see people saying to Architects, ‘Please don’t go down the same road as Bring Me The Horizon.’ Why are you so scared? Why do you think you want us to all stay the same?”
Carter: “I also can’t get over people having a go when a band changes, because that album you love is still there. That’s been given to you. I think people forget that the band is our band. That’s our creative output. And I think there’s a lot of angry people who just want to point and be angry at something.”
Sykes: “I get why people think like that. For a lot of people, me included, getting into rock music comes from being isolated, maybe being bullied or being alone, and it’s your outlet and you connect with it. But you’re ridiculed by people for that as you grow up, by kids at school who like indie or hip-hop or whatever. So when they start coming and liking ‘your’ music 10 years later, you’re like, ‘Fuck off, this is mine.’ We need to be the bigger people, though, because music is the last thing we have, the last hope we have of uniting people anymore. Everything else is a massive war: environment, what you eat, government, race. Music is the last shared thing.”
Carter: “People have to be careful, because records like [The Beatles’] ‘Sgt. Pepper‘ won’t happen if you keep starving bands and saying, ‘You can’t do this.’ Or there’ll be backlashes. Like, when people say to Architects, ‘Don’t follow Bring Me,’ I think, ‘Fuck off!’ If people keep saying that, I’ll go to the woods and write an acoustic album and call it Architects.”
Sykes: “Doing what we do is fucking hard. It’s not easy. It’s not selling out. I can write a fucking breakdown in my sleep. But I want to challenge myself. Selling out would be making something we’ve already done.”
Carter: “People think there’s this sliding scale. Like, selling out is sounding like Drake, and that’s really fucking easy. Do you know how hard it is to write a hook, or nail a fucking chorus? If it was that fucking easy to do what Drake does, don’t you think we’d all be doing it? That’s just as hard to create.”
You can read the rest of the conversation with the two over at Kerrang.com.
