According to Jordan Fish, “mother tongue” is the spiritual successor of “Drown.” The track is a love song dedicated to Oliver Sykes’ wife, Alissa Salls.

Mother tongue is the language that a person has been exposed to from birth and this is part of the personal, social and cultural identity of a child for the rest of his life. This said, the song has this title because there’s some Portuguese in it—Salls’ first language. She’s Brazilian and is important for the album as a whole, as amo’s a concept album about love and Sykes felt in love with her.

It’s a love song, so it’s an emotional one.

This is for her, the album is dedicated to Alissa.

On May 9^th, Bring Me The Horizon released a music video for the song. The film is a love story, starting with a woman wandering out of a grocery store and into an apartment complex. She meets a man and hands him a book titled Supernova, and a ring on her necklace begins to move. Once inside the apartment, she tries to get closer, but it seems as though some kind of psychic power starts to violently move everything around them. They eventually calm down and settle into the chaos and become encased in some kind of jelly-looking primordial ooze as they embrace in the air. And Oli and the rest of the band start floating too.

Their relationship is similar to a supernova, an event that occurs upon the death of certain types of stars. When a star ‘runs out of fuel’, it enters into a constant battle between the forces of gravity and fusion, this can be interpreted as all the chaos that surrounds the couple in the music video. When gravity finally wins the battle against fusion, the star collapses and eventually explodes, but after that massive explosion, everything settles down and the star becomes a neutron star or a black hole. One can interpret this explosion and eventual calmness as how things start levitating in the music video but eventually, everything settles down and the couple find peace and love.