Bring Me The Horizon released Count Your Blessings in the UK on October 30, 2006, through Visible Noise. Their debut studio album caught a band pushing its playing toward extremes, with Oli Sykes’ harsh vocals and elaborate guitar parts sharing space with breakdowns built for the pit. Opening track “Pray for Plagues” put that approach up front.
Sykes had been working on the band’s audience before there was a finished album to promote. Recalling those beginnings to Metal Hammer in 2026, he described designing Bring Me The Horizon’s MySpace page himself and circulating demos with vocals recorded in a bathroom. The music combined his interest in hardcore and screamo with guitarists Lee Malia and Curtis Ward’s enthusiasm for death metal, thrash and traditional metal. Their immediate ambition was simple: make something their friends would want to mosh to.
Malia’s guitar writing gave that music much of its restless character. “Back then I was trying to be as technical as I could,” he told Guitar World in 2010. When a reader later asked the magazine how to master the sweep picking in “Pray for Plagues,” Malia’s explanation started with understanding the D minor shape and its notes before chasing speed. For all the song’s aggression, those passages depended on learning a precise pattern. The speed came after knowing where each finger needed to go.
Behind the kit, Matt Nicholls was pushing himself just as hard. In a 2013 MusicRadar interview, he identified Swedish metal, particularly At The Gates, as an important early influence and admitted that some of the debut’s demanding playing stretched his ability. His description of the band’s writing process helps explain how the parts came together: everyone would jam in a rehearsal room, work out a riff and fit drums around it. Nicholls often approached those early arrangements through extremes of speed. Watching other drummers on tour subsequently made him more conscious of the control and consistency he wanted to develop.
The album took shape at DEP International Studios in Birmingham with producer Dan Sprigg, but filling a full record was a challenge. Sykes told Metal Hammer that the struggle to reach ten songs accounted for the inclusion of two interludes. “Slow Dance” and “Fifteen Fathoms, Counting” sit among the longer vocal tracks, leaving the original album at a compact 36 minutes. Finishing it did not resolve his doubts about the recording. Sykes remembered playing a burned CD in his car after leaving the studio and feeling disappointed with how it sounded.
Count Your Blessings reached No. 93 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 9 on the UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart. Its American release followed through Earache on August 14, 2007. The official “Pray for Plagues” video had appeared that June, giving the opening song a visual introduction ahead of the US release.
The technical approach did not remain a fixed rule for their songwriting. By his 2010 Guitar World interview, Malia was citing David Gilmour and Mark Knopfler as inspirations and reconsidering how often a song needed a breakdown or an elaborate solo. Asked later why he had moved away from the debut’s shredding, he explained that those busy passages could distract from the music Bring Me The Horizon were writing. “I’m just trying to play what the song needs,” he told Guitar World. Melody had become a stronger priority than fitting another display of technique into the arrangement.
