Bring Me The Horizon released “Can You Feel My Heart” as a single on October 8, 2013, following its appearance as the opening track on their fourth album, Sempiternal, earlier that year. Its prominent electronics grew from an experiment with Jordan Fish that helped the band establish a new way of writing.
The song was among the first they worked on together. In the band’s track-by-track interview with Metal Hammer, Fish described testing an unfamiliar approach, while Oli Sykes identified the track as the moment the keyboardist’s contribution became particularly significant. “This was the turning point,” Sykes said. The song had remained unfinished while they tried different ideas. Using Sykes’ vocal lead in the keyboard parts finally gave the chorus the character they had been searching for. Fish recalled that once they found that combination, they knew it would open the album.
That position mattered enough to keep them revisiting the arrangement. Speaking to Radio.com in 2014, Sykes described earlier versions as darker and recalled repeatedly working through the song before the chopped vocals helped it take shape. They liked its direction, but being the first thing listeners heard on the record set a higher standard. The chorus gave them a reason to commit to it.
The lyrics also established the starting point for the album. Sykes told ARTISTdirect in May 2013 that “Can You Feel My Heart” concerned “admitting you have a problem.” He conceived Sempiternal as a sequence of realizations, with each song representing a different step. Acknowledging that something was wrong came first. He wanted the music’s changes in intensity and the transitions between songs to support that progression, encouraging listeners to follow the record from beginning to end. Its opening song therefore had a specific job within the album as well as a distinctive arrangement.
The connection between Sykes’ singing and Fish’s electronics became easier to hear when Fish demonstrated the process in January 2021. In a TikTok video reported by Kerrang!, he isolated a small section of Sykes’ recorded vocal and mapped it onto a keyboard. That allowed the fragment to be played as an instrument. The electronic part was built from the singer’s voice, giving Sykes a role in the arrangement beyond the words he sang. Fish shared the explanation as renewed interest in the track was spreading across the platform.
That revival produced a measurable change in the song’s audience. Billboard reported that “Can You Feel My Heart” reached No. 1 on its Hard Rock Streaming Songs chart dated January 30, 2021, following its TikTok resurgence. The original recording was finding listeners well beyond the promotional campaign that had accompanied Sempiternal.
Bring Me The Horizon then returned to the song with another collaborator. On March 5, 2021, they released a remix with Jeris Johnson, extending the renewed attention into an official release. A track whose identity had emerged through repeated experimentation was being reworked again, eight years after it first opened the album.
