Bring Me The Horizon: Dehumanized: Why the New Song Sounds Suspiciously Like a Slaughterhouse

Bring Me The Horizon have released a brand-new song called “Dehumanized”, and if you listen closely, in places it sounds like a documentary about the animal industry. Officially it is about the dehumanisation of humankind. But the man who wrote the lines has been vegan for over 20 years. Coincidence? Probably not.

On 25 June 2026, “Dehumanized” was released, the only completely new track on “Count Your Blessings: Repented”, the re-recorded anniversary version of their 2006 debut album. The song closes the record, which comes out on 10 July, and is a deliberate return to the brutal deathcore sound the Sheffield band started out with twenty years ago. It was produced by singer Oli Sykes and guitarist Lee Malia themselves.

So much for the facts. Now it gets interesting.

Bring Me The Horizon – Dehumanized (Official Video)

What is “Dehumanized” about?

Thematically, the song revolves around dehumanisation, social decay and a pretty bleak dystopia. The single’s teaser videos showed people being degraded in a kind of industrial torture chamber. The chorus nails it: “We are becoming dehumanised.”

What is disturbing is not the message itself. What is disturbing is the imagery Oli Sykes uses to carry it.

The lyrics: imagery straight out of the slaughterhouse

Anyone familiar with animal farming will catch their breath at the very first lines. There is talk of beings that are “bred to bleed” and scraped from their mother’s womb. That is not just some metaphor. It is the literal reality of every calf in the dairy industry, taken from its mother just hours after birth.

It continues with “meat for the machine”. And then the line that makes every vegan listener prick up their ears: the talk of butchers and lambs and the plea “send me to the abattoir”.

The slaughterhouse is the worst thing the band can imagine here. The ultimate horror image to show how broken humanity’s treatment of humanity has become. And this is exactly the point no other music magazine will tell you: this image only works so well because the horror of the animal industry is real and sits deep within us. Everyone instantly senses how brutal a slaughterhouse is, as long as a human being is standing in it.

Oli Sykes has been vegan for over 20 years

Here comes the context that changes everything. Oli Sykes, singer and main lyricist of Bring Me The Horizon, is a committed vegan. And not just since yesterday.

At 16, in 2003, he became vegetarian. The trigger was a PETA flyer at one of his first hardcore shows. In interviews he later said it instantly “clicked” when he realised that, as someone who saw himself as an animal lover, he was eating animals at the same time. In his words: once he saw how animals are tormented in factory farming, he could no longer justify being part of that cruelty.

A few years later the vegetarian became a vegan, partly because he realised the dairy industry is anything but harmless either. Today Sykes is one of the best-known vegan rock stars in the world, and veganism runs through his entire body of work.

Drop Dead: the vegan fashion label

Sykes’ fashion label Drop Dead Clothing has been vegan from day one and follows a “slow fashion” principle, deliberately working against mass production. One famous example is a T-shirt he designed with the slogan “Meat Sucks” for an animal-rights campaign, which keeps showing up in band photos.

Church: the vegan bar in Sheffield

In 2018 Sykes opened “Church – Temple of Fun” in Sheffield, a 100 percent vegan bar with arcade games, live music and a tattoo studio. The idea came to him on a trip through Brazil. The concept shows how he thinks about veganism: not as sacrifice, but as culture, as a place where you have fun and just happen to eat plant-based.

PETA and animal-rights activism

Together with his bandmates, Sykes has worked with PETA and its youth division for years, among other things on campaigns against the fast-food industry. Animal rights are not a marketing gimmick for him, but a thread that has run through his life for two decades.

Just how deep this love for animals goes shows in his private life, too. For years his white dog Luna was by his side, a bond he shared again and again with his fans. Luna passed away recently. Pictures like these make it clear that, for Oli Sykes, compassion for animals is not a statement for the camera but lived, everyday reality.

So is “Dehumanized” a vegan song now?

Honest answer: no, at least not officially. The band has never framed the track as a statement for animal rights. It is explicitly about humankind.

But to claim the slaughterhouse imagery is pure coincidence would be naive. The lyricist is a man who has lived with this topic for over 20 years, who runs a vegan restaurant, who takes to the streets for animal rights. Someone like Oli Sykes knows exactly where terms like “abattoir” and “bred to bleed” come from and how much weight they carry. He deliberately uses the suffering of animals as the strongest conceivable image to make human suffering tangible.

And that is actually the most fascinating observation about this song: our culture has internalised the image of the slaughterhouse so deeply that it works as a metaphor for the absolute worst. We all instantly understand how disturbing it is. Except that when billions of animals really go through it every single day, we do not call it horror, we call it lunch.

Oli’s stance: compassion over finger-wagging

What makes Sykes so interesting is the way he talks about the subject. In an interview with Kerrang he once said, in essence, that he does not judge anyone who eats meat, because it is about compassion, which has to be taught. It is easy to say “everyone should stop eating meat”, but that ignores how people grew up and the circumstances they live in. His goal, he said, is to present things in a way that makes people think without even noticing they are thinking.

That is exactly what “Dehumanized” does. The song does not preach. It simply plants the image in the middle of a brutal deathcore track and leaves the rest to you. Anyone who really listens cannot get around it.

Count Your Blessings: Repented: where to listen to the album

With “Count Your Blessings: Repented”, Bring Me The Horizon re-record their 2006 debut album in full, twenty years on. “Dehumanized” is the only brand-new song and at the same time the album’s closing track, released on 10 July 2026. If you want to hear how raw and heavy the band reconnects with their deathcore roots here, you will find the album here:

🎧 Listen to the album on Amazon

Affiliate link: if you buy through this link, we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Frequently asked questions about “Dehumanized”

When was “Dehumanized” by Bring Me The Horizon released?
The single was released on 25 June 2026 as the only new track on the re-recording “Count Your Blessings: Repented”, which comes out on 10 July 2026.

What is “Dehumanized” about?
Officially, about the dehumanisation of humankind and social decay. The lyrics are heavily shaped by imagery from the animal industry, from the slaughterhouse to breeding to factory farming, used as a metaphor for human suffering.

Is Oli Sykes vegan?
Yes. Sykes became vegetarian in 2003 at the age of 16 and has been fully vegan for years. He runs the vegan label Drop Dead and the vegan bar Church in Sheffield and campaigns for animal rights.

Is “Dehumanized” a vegan song?
Not as an official message. But given Sykes’ decades-long commitment to animal rights, the animal-industry imagery in the lyrics is anything but coincidental.

Which album is “Dehumanized” on?
On “Count Your Blessings: Repented”, the re-recorded 20th-anniversary version of the 2006 debut album “Count Your Blessings”. “Dehumanized” is the closing track.

More from Oli Sykes

Want to dive deeper into Oli’s vegan universe? Here you go:

• His vegan fashion label: Drop Dead Clothing
• His 100 percent vegan bar in Sheffield: Church – Temple of Fun