Friday 1/29: Bring Me The Horizon—"Steal Something."
Today, we share our thoughts on a song from Bring Me the Horizon’s weird-ass 2019 mixtape, Music to Listen to….
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him) and Eric Bennett (they/them). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. Now we’re, also a M-F newsletter about songs. Our format is simple: a link to a song and a short take from each of us about what we think of it. Each day of the week has a corresponding genre: Monday is indie, Tuesday is punk, Wednesday is hip-hop, Thursday is pop, and Friday is misc.
Today, we share our thoughts on a song from Bring Me the Horizon’s weird-ass 2019 mixtape, Music to Listen to….
Bring Me The Horizon—"Steal Something."
Eric Bennett:
A ten minute long song by Bring Me the Horizon? “What did I do to Eli to deserve this?” I think to myself as I click the link. He promises me “it doesn’t sound like you think it does” and begs me to trust him. Cautiously, and begrudgingly, I click play. I guess he’s right. it doesn’t sound like I thought it would. I don’t think I like it, though. As we move past minute three, only the lyrics “I wanna steal something” and some slow, groggy beats have been shown. Eventually there seem to be.. horns? It’s unclear. It sounds confident nonetheless. I begin to think “Well, I don’t hate it, but there’s so much left.”
Five minutes have passed now, and we’re getting full verses. With the long intro, this is like if someone made “I Will Possess Your Heart” but made it into a punishment.
By minute seven, my opinion is clear. This is a fucking Twenty One Pilots song.
Goddammit.
Eli Enis:
Listen, I’ll make the argument that Bring Me The Horizon are more innovative, avant-garde, and interesting than Sky Ferreira—an artist I was ruthlessly shamed for not appreciating, and who’s considered a pinnacle of Good Music in the 2010s. This is a band who started in the mid-2000s as a particularly great deathcore act, then made one of the strangest metalcore records of all time, then made a metalcore record that could soundtrack the superbowl, then made a couple pop-rock records that don’t do too much for me but are cool, then made the project that the above song is from (more on that in a sec), and then most recently made another mixtape of sorts that sounds like everything they’ve ever done and still manages to sound like the future of heavy music.
The record that “Steal Something.” kicks off is beyond genre. Some of it sounds like an ASMR video, some of it sounds like trip-hop or a lo-fi beats compilation, some of it sounds like drum and bass, and then Halsey makes an appearance. I’m not saying all of it is great, but I’ve never heard a rock band of BMTH’s caliber (they play stadiums in the UK) make something this fucking bizarre. There are tuba blasts on here that sound like the ones on Kanye’s “Blood On The Leaves”. The majority of it is just a drum loop but there are some cool vocal manipulations and really crisp, pretty production. It’s not metal, it’s not pop, it’s not like anything they’ve ever done before it, and I think it’s fuckin sick.
And no, it doesn’t sound like goddamn Twenty One Pilots, Eric.