Oli Sykes was born on November 20, 1986, in Ashford, Kent, England. He helped form Bring Me the Horizon in 2004, beginning a recording career that moved from deathcore toward a broader combination of singing, guitars and electronics. “Throne,” from the band’s 2015 album That’s the Spirit, offers one clear example of that change.
Sykes found his way into rock through Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit while growing up in Sheffield. Recalling his school years in a 2010 Rock Sound interview, he described connecting with other alternative music fans and trying to start bands before they could properly play their instruments. The lyrics mattered as much as the noise: he recognized his own anger in the music. He later described performing his own songs as an outlet, while resisting the idea that writing personal lyrics obliged him to explain every private experience behind them.
Getting those songs heard also involved work away from the microphone. In a 2026 Metal Hammer interview, Sykes recalled designing Bring Me the Horizon’s MySpace page and circulating early demos with vocals recorded in a bathroom. Their ambitions for the 2006 debut album Count Your Blessings were close to home: they wanted music their friends would come out and mosh to. Sykes brought his interest in hardcore and screamo into the band’s mixture, and his death growls opened the record on “Pray for Plagues.”
His contribution to the writing extended beyond lyrics and vocal lines. Guitarist Lee Malia explained their early partnership to MusicRadar in 2019: “He can’t play guitar but he’ll sing a part.” That account reveals another use for Sykes’s voice: communicating ideas for the instruments around him. Keyboardist Jordan Fish brought another approach to that relationship, rearranging guitar parts in ways that prompted Malia to reconsider how he played them. Writing became a process in which a part could change shape as it passed between bandmates.
That collaboration helped shape Sempiternal in 2013. For Sykes, “Shadow Moses” showed how singing could take a larger place alongside the aggression. Looking back with MusicRadar in 2025, Malia singled out Sykes’s sung chorus as a crucial part of the song’s appeal: it retained the band’s heaviness while introducing enough melody and unfamiliar elements to signal a change. Sykes also drew on Metal Gear Solid for the track’s introduction. His interests could enter the arrangement as directly as they entered the words.
By January 2015, the band was developing That’s the Spirit at Sykes’s house without telling its management or label that work had started. In a 2015 Kerrang! interview, republished in 2025, Fish explained that the secrecy let them work without immediately facing deadlines and studio bookings. Sykes described repeatedly revising the songs until the band knew what it wanted. Once they reached the studio in Santorini, Greece, he was reluctant to bring in an outside producer who might reopen those decisions. That control accompanied a musical shift toward electronics and sung vocals, with much less screaming than before.
On “Throne,” Sykes’s involvement extended beyond his vocal performance: he shared songwriting and production credits, then co-directed the music video. That’s the Spirit was released on September 11, 2015, and reached No. 2 on the UK Official Albums Chart.
