Suicide Season

Suicide Season is the second studio album by British rock band Bring Me the Horizon. It was released on 29 September 2008 in the United Kingdom and Europe through Visible Noise. The band signed a licensing deal with Epitaph Records on 11 September 2008, with the label releasing the album on 18 November 2008 in the United States.

The album shows a major change musically from their previous releases, starting to shift from their original deathcore sound, to a metalcore approach. This would also be the last album to feature Curtis Ward on rhythm guitar. The band later released a two disc special edition of Suicide Season which features various musicians and producers remixing tracks off the album, entitled Suicide Season: Cut Up!; this was released on 2 November 2009 in the United Kingdom through Visible Noise and on 12 April 2010 in the United States through Epitaph.

Suicide Season spawned three singles ("Chelsea Smile", "Diamonds Aren't Forever" and "The Sadness Will Never End"). The album debuted on the charts of five countries. Critically, the album received a more positive response than the band's preceding debut. While praised for the genre shift, improved musicianship and newfound lyrical maturity compared to the style of 2006's Count Your Blessings, the album continued to receive critique for elements of the lyricism and some were polarized over the change of sound from Count Your Blessings. The album has begun receiving even more favourable retrospective analysis, notably surrounding Bring Me the Horizon's later critical acclaim.

After the release of band's first studio album 2006's Count Your Blessings, the band began experiencing an extremely hateful reaction from people to their music. They cited that very few publications featured them and in drummer Matt Nicholls' opinion, the band had gathered strong hatred from 'proper metalheads'. For example, when the band supported Killswitch Engage in 2007, the crowd began throwing bottles at the band before their set had even started. When preparing the music for Suicide Season, vocalist Oliver Sykes and lead guitarist Lee Malia agreed that this record would be the "make-or-break" factor for the band and that it had to be different from Count Your Blessings.

Suicide Season was written and recorded in Arboga, an isolated Swedish village with producer Fredrik Nordström. Lead vocalist Oliver Sykes described Arboga as "Nowheresville". Sykes considered the isolation Arboga provided as ideal in comparison to the constant activity in Birmingham, the recording location of their first album: "We recorded Count Your Blessings in the middle of Birmingham and it was very easy to get distracted. Arboga is a village with nothing in it apart from a tiny shop and that was it". During the initial recording of the album, Nordström initially was absent from working with the band, in Sykes perspective, he drew his own conclusion based on Count Your Blessings. However, he turned up midway through their recording process and was shocked by the music they had written, and from that point became more involved in the recording process. Nordström also taught the band some basic levels of recording and production so they could work through the night. By the end of the album, he said it was "one of the best CDs he's done in years".

The album cover features a girl holding her intestines. Sykes explains this in an interview, stating: "The whole idea behind the cover is that the girl [on the cover] has her intestines out and it's about spilling your guts basically, and opening up to the world."

Whilst in Arboga, the band caused a controversy and lit an unlit, prepared bonfire in the middle of the forest. They were put in the local paper for destroying a pagan celebration.

The album features guest appearances from vocalist JJ Peters of Deez Nuts, Sam Carter of Architects and Luis Dubuc of The Secret Handshake.