Bring Me The Horizon, O2 Arena review: British metal gets its arena swagger back

The band's graduation into an arena act was nothing short of a triumph, and has been done with no loss of intensity or rage

The band's cinematic backdrop ranged from relative calm to apocalypse (Andrew Griffin)

As you walk into the O2, there’s a huge list of names and dates made of letters as big as a person’s arm, listing the acts that are on their way to the arena. It’s just as you’d expect: Justin Bieber and Disney On Ice.

And then alongside them, playing two nights at the same huge arena, is Bring Me The Horizon. British metal is finding its place among the huge stage spectaculars.

When the band take to the stage, there’s no sense of them being dwarfed either by the size of the arena or by even bigger expectations that are on their shoulders. The music is grand, loud, tight and impressive, especially for a band that mix up so many different genres and elements.

The sound was big, far bigger even than the enormous room, and the band balanced their combination of noise and melody in a way that’s required when playing in such a huge place and for so many people.

The band – and primarily its frontman Oli Sykes – played the whole set with the kind of aggressive swagger that has become their trademark. While the show made heavy use of pyrotechnics, smoke, light and huge screens, there was none of the kind of theatricality that can mark the kind of American rock acts that are usually playing these sorts of arenas – the band were front and centre of the stage if they weren’t face-to-face with the audience at the barrier.

There was throughout the night a real sense that this is where the band have always meant to be, or at least the natural destination after the last five years of fashioning themselves into a refined, poppier act. And that’s not just the music, which seems written for huge spaces like this, but the band’s entire aesthetic.

The kinds of horrifying, cut-up scenes that have been present in some of the band’s videos, for instance, were shone from huge screens on the back and side of the stage. And the group has refined its own look, too – with all of the members in fairly anonymous dark outfits that made them look like a team.

(The only shame perhaps is that none of this commemorates the fact that the band are playing on Halloween. Maybe kicking off a huge arena tour was deemed scary enough.)

That slickness, that swagger, that confidence really emerges from the fact that despite Bring Me The Horizon’s rise to fame looking like it happened quickly and out of nowhere, they’ve been working on it for years. Slowly progressing to bigger and bigger arenas, the band can put on a show befitting the space and the size of their music.

Really it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: the band already performed an epic night at the Royal Albert Hall, backed by a choir and an orchestra. Much of the same grandeur is on display tonight – even despite the fact that there’s just the usual six of them on stage.

For all this change, though, there’s no sense that Bring Me The Horizon have sold out their former selves, or that in becoming the poppier act that brought them here they’ve wanted to bury that old music. Songs from previous albums were well represented on the setlist, and make for many of the night’s highlights – heavy songs from the band’s much harsher There Is a Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let’s Keep It a Secret stand out as one of the top parts of the night, allowing the band to bring a frenzied intensity that whips up the huge crowd too. The band even brought out Chelsea Smile, from 2008’s Suicide Season, proving that they can still bring the intensity of their older albums when needed.

Despite how far they’ve come, Sykes still seems more confident when shouting or screaming than when he’s singing. And despite how much of the audience will presumably have come to the band, it’s still those tracks that really seem to get them going.

But by finishing the set with Drown – the song released in 2014 that really signalled the much poppier direction that would come with the new album a year later – Bring Me The Horizon unite all of those strands. The band’s new spectacular and slick staging met with the kind of intensity and presence that they’ve had all along, and made clear that there’s no question this is an arena act, and one Britain should be proud to have.