HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Scream Aim Fire – Bullet For My Valentine

At Download Festival in 2006, attendees were treated to arguably the three biggest metal bands of the next generation in high, main stage spots; on the Saturday, AVENGED SEVENFOLD – at this point riding high off third record City Of Evil (2005) – preceded TRIVIUM, who had followed up their incendiary second album Ascendancy (2005) with the pummelling The Crusade (2006). On Sunday, however, it was the turn of the home nation to show what they had; playing just below fellow countrymen FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND and global megastars GUNS N’ ROSES were four guys from Newport who had only one album and an EP to their name, but were already on an astonishing upwards trajectory – and they went by the name BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE.

That summer would prove to be a huge one for the Welsh upstarts – two days after that show, they would open for METALLICA in Estonia, followed by a few dates in the United States as main support to IRON MAIDEN and then a run on the legendary Warped Tour before finishing off back on home soil with Reading & Leeds Festival. Just before they went back on the road – this time on their own headline tour – they headed to recording studio The Dairy in London for a writing session with Colin Richardson, the man who had produced their debut album The Poison (2005) and helped turn them into megastars. Of all the material that resulted, one stood out immediately – the title track to what would become their follow up album, Scream Aim Fire.

“We were going for the old-school, super-fast, thrashy metal vibe,” frontman Matt Tuck told Metal Hammer in 2020. “It was powerful, it was heavy, it felt like a musical battlefield…we got all our management and label down and we said, ‘OK, this is what we think is going to be the lead track’. Five minutes passed and everyone’s jaws were just on the floor.”

Considering how lauded The Poison was on release in 2005 – and indeed, how revered it is today – the pressure on BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE to match that on their sophomore release would have been sky-high, yet BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE left the sessions for more tour dates with a spring in their step, even playing their new track live as a teaser for what was to come. But then, the wheels came off in June 2007 when Tuck developed laryngitis that resulted in an emergency tonsillectomy.

“I didn’t warm up or warm down before any show, ever, before Scream Aim Fire,” he told Hammer in the aforementioned interview. “Looking back now I can laugh, like, ‘Oh, it was crazy!’, but it was so stupid at the same time.”

A string of tour dates were cancelled, including more with METALLICA that would have seen the band play the new Wembley Stadium mere weeks after its opening; in addition, Tuck was very conscious of his limitations by the time the band came to record Scream Aim Fire later that year in El Paso, Texas. “I was very much aware I couldn’t do what I needed to, but the wheels were in motion and we needed to get it done.”

There wasn’t just physical aspects to handle either – BULLET‘s meteoric rise brought its fair share of critics. Some complained they hadn’t earned their dues to be opening for such global names as IRON MAIDEN and METALLICA so early into their career, but others unfairly lumped them into the burgeoning ’emo’ genre over such trifles as their lyrical content and even their own name. The latter of these stirred in the band a desire to prove them wrong, but it came at a price.

“We tried too hard to show everyone what we were about as far as metal credibility goes,” admitted Tuck to Kerrang! in 2021. “We should’ve just gone down the path we wanted to. Those songs would’ve been better if we’d have done what we did on The Poison and written from the heart.”

The music critics agreed – on release in January 2008, Scream Aim Fire didn’t get the reception as it had from The Poison, with some giving it as low as half marks, but time is a great healer as they say and, a decade and a half down the line, the likes of the title track, arena anthem Hearts Burst Into Fire, the pit-inciting Waking The Demon, SKINDRED‘s Benji Webbe popping up on Take It Out On Me and fist-pumping, closing ballad Forever And Always are looked upon with much warmer eyes. It remains the band’s best-selling effort in Australia and, regardless of what the reviews said, the fans bought into it fully: it smashed into the top five of the mainstream UK album charts as BULLET took America to the sword on the Taste Of Chaos tour, and they finished the year not just bigger on that side of the Atlantic, but also headlining the legendary Alexandra Palace in London with a show that, unintentionally, revived the career of crossover thrash loons LAWNMOWER DETH at the same time.

When the band came to record third album Fever in 2009, they resorted to their comfort zone and produced a record full of more commercially palatable hard rock songs with a metal edge, a tactic they’ve continued to this day. It’s left Scream Aim Fire as their heaviest and most outlying record in that respect, but one that, despite the trials and tribulations of the time, one of their most important as well.

Scream Aim Fire was originally released on January 28th, 2008 via Jive Records.

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