Bring Me the Horizon re-recorded their 2006 deathcore debut 'Count Your Blessings' for its 20th anniversary

Bring Me the Horizon put out a full re-recording of Count Your Blessings today, twenty years after the Sheffield band's debut split the metal world down the middle. They are calling it Count Your Blessings | Repented, out on vinyl, CD and streaming, with Oli Sykes and guitarist Lee Malia running the sessions and Buster Odeholm, of Humanity's Last Breath and Vildhjarta, handling the mix.

The 2006 original was the sound of five teenagers screaming through a deathcore template: breakdowns, pig squeals, song titles like "Pray for Plagues" and "A Lot Like Vegas." It got them signed and it got them bottled, most famously at Reading in 2008. Sykes has spent most of the years since walking away from that sound, through the metalcore of Sempiternal, the arena pop of amo, the maximalism of the Post Human records. Going back meant learning to scream like a nineteen-year-old again, and by his own account it took him a while to remember how.

What actually changed

This is a re-recording, not a remaster. The band played the whole thing over. Odeholm's mix is the obvious tell. Where the original sounded thin and boxy, the way most mid-2000s deathcore did on a small budget, Repented is wide and low and heavy, closer to the high-definition production the band uses now. The reworked "Black & Blue" they shared in June keeps the original's ugliness and puts weight underneath it, the guitars tuned down and hitting harder.

A couple of things moved. "Liquor & Lost Love" is back under its original working title, "Dragon Slaying." And the record closes on a brand new song, "Dehumanized," that Sykes has tied to Agustina Bazterrica's 2017 novel Tender Is the Flesh, a book about a society that farms humans for meat. It is the one piece on the tracklist that is not twenty years old.

Why re-record it at all

Re-recording your own catalog has become a familiar move, usually for reasons that have little to do with the music. Taylor Swift turned it into a rights campaign. This is a different animal. Bring Me the Horizon already own a record they used to be embarrassed by, so Repented plays less like a business maneuver and more like a director's cut. The band calls it a "recontextualisation," a chance to hear the songs the way they might have landed if the teenagers who wrote them had the studio the adults now have.

Whether that is worth doing depends on what you wanted from Count Your Blessings in the first place. For the people who loved it, the charm was partly in how rough and young it sounded. A cleaner, heavier version answers a question some of those fans never asked. It also lets the band stand behind an album they spent years putting at arm's length, which is its own kind of statement.

The show

The release is bolted to a live moment. Bring Me the Horizon are playing Count Your Blessings front to back for the first time at Manchester's Bowlers Exhibition Centre, as part of Outbreak Festival, the same weekend the album drops. The support bill is stacked with heavy acts, among them Static Dress, Dying Wish, Rolo Tomassi and Heriot. For a group that now headlines festivals with pop hooks and orchestral interludes, giving a full night to the deathcore record they used to dodge is the whole point.

Count Your Blessings | Repented is out now. The band from 2006 would probably hate it. The band from 2026 sounds fine with that.