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Bring Me the Horizon: Post Human: Nex Gen review – a defining album of our digitally overloaded era

Despite losing a key member, the arena-filling pop-metal stars still thrill with their surprise-released new record – a masterpiece of glutted sonic mayhem

The Sheffield pop-metallers’ Post Human project began back in 2020 with Survival Horror, a nine-track album which chimed eerily loudly with the Covid pandemic, and not just because of the noisy music: Dear Diary played on the dullness of lockdown (“The sky is falling, it’s fucking boring / I’m going braindead, isolated”) while big single Parasite Eve was written pre-Covid but seemed to pre-empt it with its tale of apocalyptic disease. meanwhile has the brilliant “what if we …?” pairing of Lil Uzi Vert with hardcore legend Daryl Palumbo and a huge Sykes chorus; Darkside is like J-pop meets goth rock in a vast aircraft hangar; Lost is simply one of the greatest pop punk songs of all time; Strangers is a power ballad that’s perfect for waving not lighters but phone lights aloft, suffused as it is – like all of Nex Gen – with the anxiety and aesthetics of digital life. Closing R&B-inflected ballad Dig It can’t resolve itself and spasms into glitches, and the pachinko-parlour madness of Top 10 Statues That Cried Blood makes it an instant BMTH hall-of-famer: bratty pop-punk with Sykes at his very best, pushing his voice to the edge and experiencing a split-second of silent freefall before the chorus catches him on the offbeat.

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