
Cătălina-Diana Teliban – “All Hail Nex Gen” – the survival story we didn’t know we needed
Far from an audience-expanding album, the second instalment in Bring Me the Horizon’s Post Human series offers the listeners a trip into an alternate universe mixed with psychotherapeutic confessions and cult-y mythologizations of the self. Not catering to audiences previously familiar with the band might be the very thing that gives the record its chance to excel at what it is – a concept album in the strongest sense of the word – as it allows space for artfully intentional tracks, which despite not recommending themselves to stream and relisten on their own, carry the story forward with the exquisite continuity that other story-driven albums lack precisely because of the fear of losing streams and not charting.
The album chronicles a protagonist’s descent into the cult of Youtopia: “a home/ Beyond our bones,” encouraging the protagonist to “connect to the Divine,” in what appears to be a genuine attempt at making peace with one’s emotions. In Matrix fashion, the song concludes that Youtopia is like walking into a dream and escaping the coma, ending in a sonically entrancing sound and signaling the beginning of the end as it transitions to the alarming and anxiety inducing sound of the next song, Kool-Aid. The continuation begins a ping-pong game between extreme emotions of damnation, as narrated by the cult-leaderesque voice in Kool-Aid (“‘Cause you got a taste now, drank the Kool-Aid by the jug/So suffer your fate, oh, come here and give me a hug/Nobody loves you like I love you”), and mindful realizations that “there’s no love like your own” and you ought to save yourself (“The fight’s inside, I’ll take myself to hell and back”).
The following three songs begin a descent into suicidal ideation, as the feigned spirituality of Youtopia turns out to be a fraud, going from “Blue angels tryna sacrifice the shame” to “Sinking under/Think my angel’s fallen/Safe place plundered”. The stakes increase from begging to be talked off the ledge, to claiming a bullet with one’s name on, culminating with a cryptic outro played in reverse which, when played correctly, signals to the listener that the protagonist is starting to doubt everything: “I don’t believe it’s safer for them in Youtopia either/(…)/All subjects in Youtopia, their bodies are vegetative.”
The middle track of the album is a strongly Christian-inspired chant, calling on all the Archangels in ritualistic fashion, before stopping abruptly to alert that “someone’s coming” and transitioning into the next section of the album. The next three songs – n/A, LosT and sTraNgeRs –shift the previous cult setting into a rehab facility setting, where the protagonist, having come to seek help, finally introduces himself (“Hi, my name’s Oli and I’m an addict”). Emotional contemplations on feeling like nothing can help (“Why am I this way?/ Stupid medicine, not doin’ anything”) lead to indulging in self-harm (“red crescent moons all over my hands”) and ultimately settle on the blunt realization that “We’re just a room full of strangers/Looking for something to save us/Dying to live, living to die.”
R.i.p. seemingly brings the point of view back to the cult leader persona, in an angry sounding electronic song, cussing out the protagonist for leaving, which ends with a ceremonious eulogy used to cleverly transition to the next song, AmEN!, which feels like a conversation between the two characters through maybe the most sonically intense song of the entire record. The following two songs narrate the experience of relapse, with DiE4u being a beautiful mixture of slow to heavy sounds, and a lyrical push-pull of emotions “You know you’re everything I hate, wish I could escape/ But you know I would die for you.” The final song concludes the album on a nihilistic note, grappling between not wanting to submit (“I can’t keep quiet at the table anymore, no”) and resigning with the fact that “the only thing I figured out is life is a grave/ And I dig it”. After two minutes of silence, the album ends with an outro in a new character’s voice, M8, “your personal multidimensional friend,” teasing more information before getting cut off and ending the record on a cliffhanger of sorts.
All in all, the album fulfills the thesis that frontman Oliver Sykes promised, of “drawing a parallel between recovery as a planet and a society, and my recovery as a drug addict” (interview by Emma Madden for Revolver, 2022). And the best part about it is that it lends itself to a whole array of interpretations with its usage of hints of posthumanist philosophy and references to previous work. Spectograms included on the album lead to a cryptic website, coded with layers upon layers of puzzles further developing the story and revealing unreleased (as of now) songs, introducing even more characters than we hear on the record, and establishing the story as a solid rival to even survival videogames as well established as The Last of Us.