Jona Weinhofen Talks About Leaving Bring Me The Horizon

Australian guitarist Jona Weinhofen was a member of Bring Me The Horizon during their peak: from 2009 until 2012. He played on the band’s seminal 2010 LP, There Is A Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There Is A Heaven Let’s Keep It A Secret, and featured on the iconic music video for The Sadness Will Never End.

As well as his time with the UK metal outfit, Weinhofen is a member of I Killed The Prom Queen (currently inactive), played on the US metalcore group Bleeding Through’s 2008 record, Declaration, and was a touring member of Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows (D.R.U.G.S), who reformed in 2020 and released the album Destroy Rebuild last year (2021-2022).

Old-school Bring Me The Horizon fans have been wondering why Weinhofen left the band in 2012, with the band only citing “undisclosed reasons” at the time. In a recent interview on the Club Good Podcast, Weinhofen has finally opened up about his short but influential tenure in Bring Me The Horizon.

“I was with Bring Me for three years, I joined right after they dropped Suicide Season,” Weinhofen began, telling the Club Good hosts that he joined as the band was coming up and immediately entered the touring cycle for that album.

After talking about Skrillex and the convergence of metal and EDM music in the late 2000s, Weinhofen was quizzed about his departure from Bring Me The Horizon.

“We had just finished recording Sempiternal (2013), so that was my second album with them. I was sort of involved in that – that was this weird time when they brought in Jordan [Fish, keyboards], who was the guy that sort of replaced me, but not really.”

Weinhofen continued, “He became the keyboard player and did a lot of the songwriting and production. He actually came in just to write with the band – he was in this other band at the time called Worship and they were this really cool, dark synth-wave-y pop kind of stuff with melodic vocals.

Weinhofen stated that his time in Bring Me The Horizon expanded his musical horizons. “They [Bring Me The Horizon] were already a bit bored with the standard hardcore bands, heavy music and deathcore, so they were looking for different ways to diversify and find this sound, which they did.

“Jordan was a big part of that,” he said. Weinhofen claimed that once Fish joined, songwriting with Bring Me The Horizon became a lot of “closed door writing sessions” where he and Oli Sykes were working closely together as Sykes was learning to sing.

“I wrote about 25% of riffs on the previous album, There Is A Hell, and it was more like a jam situation… This was different, Oli and Jordan and Lee [Malia, guitar] mostly were in their writing and I was off in a hotel with our bass player [Matt Kean] who didn’t have a place to live and neither did I.

Weinhofen added, “I was writing riffs on my own and sending them stuff – some of my stuff did make it on the record but in that band, I kind of was a little enabled in some ways. I joined this band that was young and just like on another level than what I was used to.

Weinhofen went on to detail his hardcore music background, where he was used to meeting fans at the merch table after shows. However, in Bring Me The Horizon, that was near-impossible as the band’s fans were “fanatic” and even tracked down their houses.

“They were like the party band and always getting into some kind of controversy, and I got wrapped up in it all,” he continued. Weinhofen attempted to connect with the fans by trying to be too “edgy” on Twitter as his platform grew.

“There’s not really much else to tell – the relationship kind of broke down and then I ended up having a meeting with the manager and he gave me this list of things that they were unhappy about,” Weinhofen shared.

He concluded, “I didn’t really get a chance to fix it – it was just like, ‘Hey, they’re unhappy about this. Oh, and by the way, we’re just gonna part ways’. So that was after three years at the end of 2012… There was only two shows that we played with me and Jordan in the band together.”

You can check out the full interview below.