Bring Me The Horizon’s Count Your Blessings Repented Guide

Bring Me The Horizon’s Count Your Blessings | Repented, released on July 10, 2026, is a full re-recording of their 2006 debut album twenty years later. Across the ten corresponding tracks, the total running time grew by just 83 seconds, from 36 minutes and 16 seconds to 37 minutes and 39 seconds. Eighty-seven percent of that added time falls on just three songs: “Slow Dance,” “(I Used to Make Out With) Medusa,” and “Off the Heezay.” The remaining seven tracks move by only 10 seconds in total, and three of them are actually shorter. The re-recording does not expand the album evenly across the board.

In the month of release, the label that owned the recording studio went into administration

The 2006 debut appeared on the UK Albums Chart twelve days after release, entering at No. 93 on the chart dated November 11, 2006. It stayed on the chart for one week and was gone the next. That single line was the first public chart record left by the Sheffield five-piece, with nothing at the time hinting that the exact same running order would climb to No. 6 twenty years later.

The Digbeth label founded by UB40 in 1980

The album was recorded at DEP International Studios in Digbeth, Birmingham, listed at an Andover Street address, with Dan Sprigg producing. What stands out immediately is that this building was never set up for deathcore.

DEP International was founded in 1980 by the members of UB40 so they could control their own masters, signing a worldwide distribution deal with Virgin Records in 1982. The studio was built by Britain’s most commercially successful reggae group to house their own recording and distribution under one roof. A room tuned for music that leaves wide space around bass and drums and strips back upper-register clutter was suddenly tasked with catching blast beats and breakdowns. Both the hardware and the room acoustics would have been set up on those original assumptions.

The band came from Sheffield, while the sessions took place in Birmingham—meaning they traveled out of their home city to rent a room owned by a label from an entirely different musical world. As working conditions for a debut album, it is hard to imagine that setup was their first artistic choice; it is far more natural to read it as a location settled by whichever room was open within the budget available.

That company went into administration in October 2006 and was liquidated in April 2008.

The UK release date of Count Your Blessings was October 30, 2006, catalog number TORMENT95CD, ten tracks. In other words, this debut arrived in shops in the exact month the company housing its recording studio was folding. I do not use that coincidence to explain the sound itself. Yet when reading the band’s motivation for wanting to re-record the album twenty years later, the fact that the original was made in that room at that moment is impossible to set aside.

Inside a company going under, an unproven band holds very little bargaining power. Studio hours, engineering support, and the number of retakes were hardly conditions where the band’s wishes would carry the day. Those five young players fixed ten songs onto tape in that room and sent them out into the world. Plenty of ground for wanting a do-over twenty years later was already laid right there.

Criticism targeted the production rather than the songs

Classified as deathcore, the album pulls in elements of melodic death metal, death metal, and black metal. The band’s stated aim was simply to be as heavy and brutal as they possibly could. Critical reception was sharply divided: About.com, AllMusic, Chronicles of Chaos, MetalSucks, and Terrorizer all published reviews, with scores scattering from 2 out of 10 all the way to 8.5 out of 10.

A spread that wide is unusual. Listening to the exact same disc at the same time, one reviewer handed it a failing grade while another gave it near-full marks. Rather than a simple split in personal taste, it suggests that critics had not yet settled on a yardstick for measuring deathcore itself.

The split also had a clear pattern. Praise went toward the playing and sheer intensity, while criticism clustered around unremarkable songwriting and, above all, the quality of the production. What took the blame was not the people playing the instruments, but the engineering process that captured and fixed those sounds.

When the band re-recorded the same running order twenty years later, the production credits went to Oli Sykes and Lee Malia—the players themselves. The people who had lived with the criticism took over the exact job that had been criticized.

The 2006 credits list five members: Oli Sykes (vocals), Lee Malia (guitar), Curtis Ward (guitar), Matt Kean (bass), and Matt Nicholls (drums). It was a two-guitar lineup, a detail that comes into play later. Its UK certification is Silver, equivalent to 60,000 units. Having a one-week chart run at No. 93 sit alongside 60,000 cumulative sales on the same record means the album sold retroactively after the band’s later releases broke through.

The US edition arrived later still, released on August 14, 2007, through Earache Records in both a 10-track version (MOSH 355) and an 11-track version (MOSH 3551). Track 11 is a cover of Slipknot’s “Eyeless,” which explains why track counts sometimes disagree when hunting for imported copies secondhand.

In 2026 the recording moved to a home studio in Brazil, and the guitar credit narrowed to Lee Malia alone

Count Your Blessings | Repented comes out on RCA, running 11 tracks and 42 minutes, 7 seconds. It was recorded at Casa do Syko, Oli Sykes’s home studio in Brazil. Where 2006 was someone else’s studio and someone else’s producer, 2026 became their own house and their own production credit. If you had to sum up what changed across twenty years in a single line, that shift is the biggest.

Recording at a home studio also removes the clock. Instead of being boxed in by daily booking rates, there is no outside cap on how many times a take can be redone. If lingering regrets over what they wished they had done remained from 2006, the conditions to settle that account finally came together twenty years on.

Who they trusted with mixing and mastering

Mixing and mastering were handed to Swedish musician and producer Buster Odeholm, with Harry James engineering. Only Track 11, “Dehumanized,” carries an additional production credit for Zakk Cervini. Because that single new song has a different production setup, it is natural to read it as a separate contemporary production rather than part of the re-recording sessions.

Put another way, the band kept control of everything up to locking in the performances, and outsourced only the final stage of shaping the sonic image. Remembering that this final stage was the exact target of criticism in 2006 makes the choice of collaborator central to the project. Record and mix everything yourself, and you risk stumbling in the same spot as twenty years ago; keep command of the playing and hand only the final sonic judgment to an outside pair of ears, and the division of labor looks like the work of musicians who knew the criticism inside out.

The missing six-string

The 2026 credits list four members: Oli Sykes (vocals, production), Lee Malia (guitars, production), Matt Kean (bass), and Matt Nicholls (drums). What was a two-guitar band in 2006 is credited solely to Malia on guitar in 2026.

Curtis Ward’s absence is no minor footnote in the band’s history. Released as the debut single on June 4, 2007, “Pray for Plagues” was largely dropped from live sets after 2011 and was played on stage only five times across the twelve years up to 2023. Oli Sykes has never hidden his distaste for performing the song live. Even so, the band brought Ward back in 2014 to play it at the Camden Underworld and again that December at Wembley Arena. It may be a sound they left behind, but they never severed ties with it completely.

Re-recording songs written for two guitars under a single guitarist’s name requires balancing the books somewhere—whether through overdubs, rewritten parts, or omission. Which path they chose shows up in the track lengths.

The restored working title “Dragon Slaying”

Track 7 changed its title outright: “Liquor & Love Lost” on the 2006 pressing becomes “Dragon Slaying” on the 2026 edition. In an April 13, 2026 article by Liberty Dunworth, NME reported that this restored the song’s original working title. In the same piece, the band described the project as a “recontextualisation” of the original album, calling it “sharper, heavier, and more vital than ever.”

Track 6, “Slow Dance,” and Track 9, “Fifteen Fathoms, Counting,” now carry an “(Instrumental)” tag in the tracklist, a label absent from the corresponding positions in 2006. Two tracks preceded the album as singles: “Black & Blue (2026 Repented)” on June 12, 2026, and “Dehumanized” on June 25.

The positions of the two explicitly instrumental tracks are worth noticing: Track 6 and Track 9, right in the middle of the album and just before the closing stretch. Dropping two wordless intervals into separate spots divides the listener’s focus by the presence or absence of vocals. Because the lack of a label in 2006 does not prove those tracks had vocals back then, only the 2026 side of that comparison is certain. Still, the fact remains that the 2026 edition went out of its way to mark them as instrumentals. Even with the same running order, how the album signals its pacing has changed.

The choice of lead single is telling too. As the table below shows, “Black & Blue” is one of the tracks that got shorter. While promising an album “sharper, heavier, and more vital than ever,” the very first track they sent out was one where length had been trimmed—showing through the single choice itself that heaviness is not measured in seconds.

Slow Dance, Medusa, and Off the Heezay grew longer, while the rest stayed within the margin of error

The 2006 figures are exact CD durations from the Visible Noise pressing (TORMENT95CD), while the 2026 figures come from streaming metadata, where durations are rounded to whole seconds.

What comes out of this table is not a uniform shift. Had every track grown thicker across the board, we would be looking at an album-wide policy such as a slower tempo or wider pauses. That is not what happened. Nearly the entire increase is concentrated in three songs, while the rest stay within rounding error. Track-by-track decisions, not a blanket rule, drove the re-recording.

There are two ways to approach a re-recording: lock the score in place and update only the playing and engineering, or reach inside and alter the structure of the songs themselves. Follow the first approach and the durations barely budge. Here, the band handled seven songs the first way and stepped into the second on just three.

Those three expanded songs also carry more weight within the overall album. On the 2006 disc they accounted for 12 minutes and 34 seconds, or 34.7% of the 10-track runtime; in 2026 they account for 13 minutes and 47 seconds, or 36.6%. A shift of 1.9 percentage points looks modest on paper, yet it shows the album’s center of gravity leaning further toward those three pieces. Specifically, only the structural extremes moved—the two longest songs and the single shortest interlude—while the tracks lined up in the middle kept both their positions and their lengths almost untouched.

The fact that three tracks shrank carries even more weight

Braille, Black & Blue, and Fifteen Fathoms, Counting all run shorter. Each difference is 1.8 seconds or less, and because the 2026 metadata is rounded to whole seconds, we can read the direction of the change but cannot pin down the exact sub-second margin. That remains a limit of the available data.

Even so, the direction matters. A song gets shorter in a re-recording when extra repetitions are cut, the tempo is nudged up, or slack in the intro and outro is tightened. In at least three tracks, the band did the exact opposite of what the phrase “making it heavier” usually implies. The word “sharper” fits this direction: instead of buying heaviness by adding length, they trimmed fat to raise density.

Medusa and Off the Heezay were 26 milliseconds apart in 2006

One small numerical detail is too close to ignore. On the 2006 CD, “(I Used to Make Out With) Medusa” runs 338,986 milliseconds and “Off the Heezay” runs 338,960 milliseconds—a gap of just 26 milliseconds. For two separate tracks on a CD to land that close by pure chance is hard to credit. In the 2026 edition, both are listed at an identical 365,000 milliseconds.

The available sources do not explain why. Nothing in the credits mentions a hidden track or unusual cutoff on “Off the Heezay,” nor have the band members commented on whether the 2006 match was deliberate or coincidental. Still, I read it as a trace that the closing stretch of the album was conceived not as two separate songs, but as a matched 5-minute-39-second pair. Twenty years later, that pair remained a pair, each stretched by the exact same 26 seconds. Reading it as a preserved structural design is far more natural than assuming lightning struck twice.

Over twenty years, the debut’s chart standing moved from No. 93 to No. 6

Lined up by release date, Bring Me The Horizon’s studio albums run from October 30, 2006’s Count Your Blessings through September 29, 2008’s Suicide Season, October 4, 2010’s There Is a Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There Is a Heaven Let’s Keep It a Secret, March 29, 2013’s Sempiternal, September 4, 2015’s That’s the Spirit, January 25, 2019’s amo, October 29, 2020’s POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR, and May 24, 2024’s POST HUMAN: NeX GEn.

Within that catalog, the sound of the debut stands completely alone. Framed as the band’s early deathcore chapter, it was progressively left behind on subsequent releases. Left behind does not just mean they played different styles later: for most of those twenty years, the debut was treated more like a youthful indiscretion. It dropped out of live setlists, newer listeners entered through the later records, and the debut receded into the first line of the band’s biography.

That treatment reversed in 2026.

Count Your Blessings | Repented entered at No. 6 on the chart dated July 23, 2026. The track order is the same, and the people playing are nearly the same; what changed was the production and the standing of the band releasing it. A running order that appeared for a single week at No. 93 returned to the exact same national chart at No. 6. Everything those twenty years accomplished sits inside the gap between those two numbers.

The release date carries its own twist. Because the original album came out on October 30, 2006, the actual twentieth anniversary falls on October 30, 2026. Yet the re-recording arrived on July 10—112 days ahead of the anniversary date. Rather than timing the release to the calendar, the band timed it to a live show on the same day, anchoring the project to a physical venue rather than an anniversary. Coming two years after POST HUMAN: NeX GEn, the album also landed right in the gap where fans were waiting for the band’s next move.

BMG reissued the original 2006 recording digitally on January 28, 2026, followed by a vinyl pressing on July 31. That means two versions of the exact same running order now sit side by side on the market: the version that peaked at No. 93 in 2006, and the version that hit No. 6 in 2026. A similar pattern emerged when we recounted the “six-year silence” around Sakanaction’s 834.194 from its release dates: the meaning of a record is never decided strictly inside the record itself. When the surrounding chronology moves, the value of the exact same song list shifts with it.

On July 10, 2026, the day of release, the band played the album in full at an Outbreak-promoted show at Manchester’s B.E.C. Arena, joined by Static Dress and Dying Wish. That meant playing straight through a tracklist that included songs they had spent years saying they hated performing live. Nothing demonstrates more clearly that the re-recording was a statement of posture rather than a routine catalog reissue.

Four extra seconds on Pray for Plagues and 26 extra seconds on Off the Heezay are different kinds of additions

Duration changes mean different things on different songs. Below we walk through the key tracks not by the size of the difference, but in album order.

Pray for Plagues

The job of Track 1 comes down to grabbing the listener’s body within the opening thirty seconds. Its guitar riff is written around D-minor sweep picking that Lee Malia himself has described as “really weird” and “all over the place”—not a tidy up-and-down exercise, but a phrase where the fingers slide across the neck without settling. When Matt Nicholls’s kick and floor tom lock in underneath, the low end drives repeatedly right below the breastbone. Kerrang!’s Emily Carter compared the riff to “a bundle of barbed wire being smashed against a guitar,” and Louder’s Merlin Alderslade noted that it still crushes today.

Just over four seconds were added here. Depending on tempo, that amounts to little more than a bar or two of breathing room—the scale of a single added pause rather than a structural rewrite. This is a track that kept its twenty-year-old blueprint intact and updated the performance and sonic weight.

Tell Slater Not to Wash His Dick

Track 2 grows by 8.6 seconds—larger than the four-second nudge on the opener, but in a different league from the three tracks that expand by more than twenty seconds. The opening pair of songs were clearly re-recorded without altering their architecture.

Slow Dance

Measured by percentage, this is the largest expansion on the record: 76.4 seconds becomes 97.0 seconds, an increase of 27%. A miniature that lasted just 1 minute and 16 seconds in 2006 now runs 1 minute and 37 seconds.

At the same time, the 2026 edition adds the “(Instrumental)” label. Having the shortest piece on the album grow by more than a quarter while explicitly dropping vocals means the work here went well beyond a clean re-recording. The briefest track on the album received the heaviest structural rewrite.

Short tracks on a heavy album serve to reset the flow, acting as both a breath and a run-up into the next heavy song. Stretching that interlude by more than 20% and marking it as instrumental strengthens its role as a structural rest. What felt like a brief passing point twenty years ago is now deployed as a load-bearing part of the album’s pacing.

(I Used to Make Out With) Medusa

Even in 2006 this song was treated as a centerpiece, praised as the crown jewel of the album for its razor-sharp guitar work and thunderous breakdown—the sound of reckless youth captured raw on tape.

Here 5 minutes and 39 seconds becomes 6 minutes and 5 seconds. Twenty-six seconds is more than enough room to drop in an entire extra breakdown section. Because a breakdown halves or quarters the perceived pulse and crushes the space with low-tuned chugs alone, extending it stretches perceived time even more than the stopwatch suggests: the span where you hold your breath and keep your neck and shoulders tensed grows by a quarter.

Putting the core of the album’s expansion right here makes complete sense. The band took the section that had always been praised as the album’s strongest moment and stretched it further with twenty years of accumulated gear and stamina. Lengthening what worked best is just as natural a motive for re-recording as fixing what critics attacked.

Off the Heezay

The closing track of the original album also grows by 26 seconds to 6 minutes and 5 seconds, marching in lockstep with “Medusa” and preserving the 2006 design in which the final two tracks share the exact same length.

Extending the closer directly alters how the album ends. After pushing through ten tracks, the listener still meets the two longest pieces back to back at the finish, and both are now heavier and longer. Even more importantly, the 2026 edition places a brand-new eleventh track right after it. Where the end of “Off the Heezay” was the end of the record in 2006, the 2026 finale turns into a structure where one more song waits beyond the two six-minute monoliths. You cannot gauge the full effect of those 26 added seconds without accounting for the new track waiting on the other side.

Dehumanized

Track 11 is the sole piece that is not a re-recording: a new song running 4 minutes and 28 seconds that targets both the silencing of voices in contemporary society and the meat industry. Placing it after the ten re-recorded tracks shifts the album’s landing spot from “re-enacting twenty years ago” to “what the band has to say twenty years later.” Zakk Cervini’s additional production credit confirms that this final track was built under a separate design.

The placement works. Just as your ears finish tracing the ten familiar songs, an unfamiliar track arrives at the exact same sonic pressure. Speaking about 2026 themes in their 2006 musical vocabulary gives the re-recording project its strongest possible exit.

The shortened tracks: Braille, Black & Blue, and Fifteen Fathoms, Counting

All three shrink by less than two seconds, well inside rounding margins, so leaning too heavily on the exact numbers would overread the data. What does not move, however, is the fact that three of the ten songs shifted toward brevity.

Whether to start with the 2006 original or the 2026 recording

The choice depends on where you are coming from. Listeners who discovered Bring Me The Horizon from Sempiternal onward should start with the 2026 edition: its loudness and stereo imaging match contemporary standards, leaving far fewer rough edges for ears working backward from the band’s 2010s and 2020s catalog.

Conversely, if your interest lies in early-2000s deathcore as a historical style, starting with the 2026 version hides the main point. The fact that contemporary criticism zeroed in on the 2006 production also means that rawness functioned as part of the style itself. Hear it only in its tidied-up 2026 form, and you cannot hear what all the argument was about. For listeners curious about the genre’s history, I would put the 2006 pressing first—though I will state upfront that this is my own call.

Whichever version you choose, playing both editions back to back in one sitting is best avoided. Running through all 11 tracks takes 42 minutes and 7 seconds, roughly 5 minutes and 51 seconds longer than the 2006 disc, and the added time is concentrated in low-end breakdowns that pummel the ear. Play the same running order twice in a row across the two masters, and by the second half your ears will lose the ability to judge loudness differences accurately. Splitting the two versions across separate days, or placing a different style of music between them, yields a much clearer comparison.

If you want to hear the difference without cranking the volume, sorting out your playback conditions first is the fastest route. On streaming platforms, this is territory where each service’s published loudness normalization target comes directly into play, and the 2026 master is built in a way that triggers normalization strongly. If you plan to listen quietly at night, checking the headphone conditions suited for late-night low-volume listening comes first: unless your gear resolves the leading edge of low-frequency transients rather than sheer bass quantity, those 26 added seconds will register only as extra clock time.

To branch out by style, our Introduction to Alternative Rock sits right alongside as guitar music that branched in the opposite direction—where subtracting notes to open up space and piling notes on to crush space share a common starting point.

Listen to Count Your Blessings | Repented on Apple Music / Search on Spotify

Release dates, catalog numbers, credits, durations, and chart positions reflect information verified as of September 21, 2026.