This is the album that made BMTH's Oli Sykes fall in love with metal

What was the album that got you into metal for the first time? Paranoid? The Number of the Beast? For Bring Me the Horizon frontman Oli Sykes, it was a 2002 metalcore record that first made him fall in love with the genre.

Sykes was interviewed via Cameo for the Spanish YouTube channel Sobre La Dosis this week when he discussed his favourite music (see below). “The first metal record I bought… so it depends what you define as metal. The first couple of records were like Linkin Park and stuff like that. The first album that I was like ‘wow this is metal’ was Killswitch Engage.”

He then explained why the band’s Alive or Just Breathing hit him so hard: “I remember I put that record on for the first time, I was like ‘oh my god this is too heavy.’ We were going on holiday – I was going to Spain on a bus from England and it took like, 24 hours and I just bought (the album) just before I got on the bus.

When I first listened to it, I was like ‘this too heavy for me. I don’t like it. It’s too crazy.’ And then I had nothing else to listen to, so I just kept listening to it and by the time I got to Spain I was fucking in love with it.”

It was Killswitch Engage, Sykes revealed, that then led him to other metal outfits like Decapitated and Suffocation. “I think that’s really what got me into like… got my taste for heavy music because after that I was listening to all kinds of different death metal like Decapitated and Suffocation and like, just harder shit like Zao and stuff like that, which I’m thankful for,” he added.

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