October 2, 2026
Bring Me The Horizon Brings Chaos, Confetti and Carnage to Ottawa
Bring Me The Horizon rolled into Ottawa’s Canadian Tire Centre on Friday, October 2, bringing their massive POST HUMAN: NeX GEn The Third Ascension Program-tour along with The Plot In You and Motionless In White. By the time the final pieces of red confetti hit the arena floor, Ottawa had proven it was more than capable of getting downright unruly.
Ohio metalcore outfit The Plot In You kicked things off under appropriately dark, moody lighting. Led by vocalist Landon Tewers alongside guitarist Josh Childress, bassist Ethan Yoder and drummer Michael Cooper, the band delivered a compact but solid opening set. Songs including ‘Don’t Look Away’, ‘Divide’, ‘Forgotten’, ‘Left Behind’ and the massive ‘FEEL NOTHING’ showcased the band’s knack for balancing crushing heaviness with more atmospheric, emotional moments. It was a brooding start to a night that would become progressively less controlled.
Motionless In White wasted absolutely no time turning up the temperature. Frontman Chris Motionless commanded the stage while continually acknowledging the sea of devoted fans in front of him, many of whom seemingly knew every single word. The emotional connection between band and audience was palpable, particularly during Another Life’ and their closing number, ‘Eternally Yours’.
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Their nine-song set also tore through ‘Sign of Life’, ‘Voices’, ‘Slaughterhouse’ and ‘Scoring the End of the World’, delivering the theatrical blend of industrial metal and metalcore that has become the Scranton, Pennsylvania band’s calling card. Chris capped things off with a beloved Motionless In White tradition, tossing roses into the crowd during ‘Eternally Yours’. Romantic, but make it metal.
Then to the most anticipated moment of the night when Bring Me The Horizon took the stage.
From the moment Oli Sykes and company appeared, subtlety was officially dead.
Visually, the entire production felt like stepping inside an apocalyptic video game, part dystopian nightmare, part digital fever dream. Massive screens surrounded the band with glitching graphics, ominous warnings and strange characters that helped guide the show through its different chapters, giving the whole production a loose narrative rather than simply serving as background visuals. At times it felt like the audience had been dropped into some corrupted virtual world where Bring Me The Horizon were providing the soundtrack to civilization’s final boss battle.
The imagery perfectly complemented the band’s POST HUMAN universe, blurring the lines between concert, video game and end-of-the-world cinematic experience. Between the unsettling on-screen characters, frantic digital visuals and recurring sense that something had gone catastrophically wrong, the production added another layer of controlled chaos to an already massive show.
CO2 cannons? Check. Pyro? Check. Lasers? Check. Confetti? Plenty. Bring Me The Horizon have evolved dramatically since forming in Sheffield more than two decades ago, but Sykes, guitarist Lee Malia, bassist Matt Kean and drummer Matt Nicholls have turned that evolution into one enormous live spectacle.
Opening with ‘DArkSide’, the band immediately launched into ‘The House of Wolves’, ‘MANTRA’ and ‘Happy Song’, with Sykes relentlessly demanding more from Ottawa. Apparently the crowd took that personally.
Two walls of death erupted during the night, a circle pit seemed to exist almost permanently on the floor, and crowdsurfers flowed toward the barricade with impressive consistency. Ottawa audiences can occasionally be notoriously subdued, but there was absolutely none of that Friday night. This crowd showed up ready for violence, the consensual metal-show variety, of course.
The set jumped beautifully between eras, with ‘Teardrops’, ‘Kool-Aid’, ‘Shadow Moses’, ‘Kingslayer’ and ‘Can You Feel My Heart’ demonstrating just how much sonic territory Bring Me The Horizon now occupies.
One of the night’s biggest thrills came when the band reached all the way back to their 2006 deathcore debut ‘Count Your Blessings’ for ‘Pray for Plagues’. Sykes brought a local fan Cameron Comeau onto the stage to help tackle the song, and instead of buckling under the pressure of suddenly screaming in front of an arena full of people, he absolutely killed it.
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The encore offered ‘Doomed’ and the emotional fan favourite ‘Drown’ before everything came down to the band’s epic anthem ‘Throne’.
Sykes instructed the audience to sit down, creating an almost surreal sight across the arena. The tension built…and built…and then the song exploded.
Huge red confetti blasted into the air as thousands of people simultaneously launched themselves back onto their feet, the Canadian Tire Centre erupting into deafening cheers.
Bring Me The Horizon didn’t simply play Ottawa Friday night. They detonated inside it.
