Bring Me The Horizon premiered the music video for “Drown” on October 21, 2014. With their Wembley Arena headline show approaching, the band had written a song specifically for the scale of that performance. Its melodic approach extended the changes they had made on Sempiternal, while the recording gave them a practical reason to take greater control of their next album.
“We wanted to write our version of an arena anthem,” Oli Sykes told The Independent ahead of the show. He did not feel the material on Sempiternal quite fulfilled what he imagined for an arena, and believed “Drown” could reach that scale without sacrificing the band’s identity. Sykes had already expanded his singing with help from keyboardist Jordan Fish. That partnership gave them another way to write for the larger rooms they were beginning to play.
The initial idea developed while the band was touring the United States. In a 2016 interview with MUSIC&RIOTS, bassist Matt Kean recalled Sykes and Fish working on the song before playing it for the other members. Their response encouraged the pair to keep developing it. Wembley supplied a specific occasion for new material, but “Drown” was also an opportunity to explore what they could write after the long Sempiternal touring cycle.
Making the single helped answer a separate question about how they would record. Drummer Mat Nicholls told Rhythm, in an interview published by MusicRadar in 2016, that the band handled “Drown” themselves, with Fish taking the production lead and Al Groves engineering. Nicholls remembered the process as sufficiently relaxed that they wanted to make an entire album that way. The experience gave them confidence in a working arrangement they had already tried together.
After the Wembley show on December 5, 2014, they began writing again unusually quickly. In a 2015 Kerrang! interview, republished in 2025, the band described meeting at Sykes’ house in January without telling their management or label that work had started. Fish explained that keeping those sessions private let them develop ideas before conversations about deadlines and studio bookings took over. They wanted time to work through the songs on their own terms.
That independence continued into the recording of That’s the Spirit. Nicholls explained that money which might otherwise have gone toward hiring a prominent producer helped pay for the studio instead. They chose Black Rock in Santorini, Greece, and took Groves with them after his work on “Drown.” Sykes told Kerrang! that they had already spent considerable time revising the songs before recording and did not want an outside producer reopening decisions they felt they had settled.
“Drown” was not initially guaranteed a place on the album. Kean told MUSIC&RIOTS that the band hesitated because listeners already knew it. After writing ten other songs, however, Sykes felt its lyrics belonged with the material he had been developing. The music also fit the record well enough that leaving it out no longer made sense.
For its inclusion on That’s the Spirit in 2015, the band rerecorded the instrumental parts to match the album’s production. They retained Sykes’ original vocals, keeping part of the standalone recording in the version that followed it onto the album.
