Bring Me The Horizon released Count Your Blessings on 30 October 2006. Twenty years later, the debut still sounds like a document of five young musicians pushing every idea to the edge at once: tremolo-picked guitar lines, abrupt breakdowns, blast beats and Oli Sykes switching between low growls and a scraped-raw high scream.
The original ten-track album was recorded at DEP International Studios in Birmingham in September 2006. Bring Me The Horizon and Dan Sprigg produced it, with Sprigg also engineering and mixing. The lineup was Sykes, guitarists Lee Malia and Curtis Ward, bassist Matt Kean and drummer Matt Nicholls. Visible Noise issued the UK release.
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A debut that rarely stops to explain itself
Count Your Blessings does not ease the listener into its world. ‘Pray for Plagues’ opens with guitars already in motion, then keeps cutting between speed and floor-clearing weight. ‘Tell Slater Not to Wash His Dick’ and ‘(I Used to Make Out With) Medusa’ stretch that tension into longer songs, while the brief instrumentals ‘Slow Dance’ and ‘Fifteen Fathoms, Counting’ interrupt the violence without making the record feel calmer.
That instability became part of its pull. The riffs often arrive as separate shocks rather than a smooth arc, and the production leaves very little space between the instruments. It is easy to hear why the record travelled so quickly through MySpace-era heavy music, but it is just as easy to hear a band that had not yet found the control it would develop on Suicide Season and There Is a Hell.
Some of its language and song titles are also fixed to a cruder mid-2000s moment. An anniversary does not require pretending every part aged cleanly. What survives is the sense of velocity: a young band discovering that death-metal technique, hardcore rhythm and scene theatrics could sit in the same song without asking permission.
The band chose reconstruction over a remaster
Bring Me The Horizon did not wait for 30 October to revisit the album. On 10 July they released Count Your Blessings | Repented, a complete re-recording made by Sykes and Malia with producer and mixer Buster Odeholm. It rebuilds all ten songs, changes ‘Liquor & Love Lost’ to ‘Dragon Slaying’ and adds the new track ‘Dehumanized’.
“It was about making the record we’d always heard in our heads.”
Oli Sykes, via Sony Music Canada
That explanation matters. Repented is not a replacement history, and the original is still available through the band’s official archive. Put the two versions beside each other and the contrast is the point: the 2006 recording captures urgency before refinement; the 2026 version asks what those same structures can carry after two decades of studio knowledge and much heavier low-end production.
The band also performed the album in full at two Manchester shows in July and at Furnace Fest in Alabama on 11 October. Those dates have passed, so today’s anniversary is not a tour announcement. It is a clean marker: 20 years since Bring Me The Horizon’s first album arrived, and a rare case where the artists have made their own argument with the work instead of leaving nostalgia to speak for them.
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