BMTH & Ed Sheeran Teamed Up For A Heavied Up Version Of ‘Bad Habits’ At This Week’s BRIT Awards, And They’re Now Supposedly Working On Releasing A New Single Together.
The year is 2006. You and your friends are hanging out in the park, decked out in FSAS’s T-Shirts, high top shoes, and jeans too tight for even Yosemite Sam himself. The friend with the sweepy-est fringe (I think that makes them the leader) plays some music through his LG Cookie. The music is so heavy and chaotic, and the vocals are guttural and passionate. The band playing is Bring Me The Horizon. The ultimate band that your parents would hate. No radio station would ever play music so heavy, and they didn’t stand a chance of ever making it to stadiums, but the underground adored them. This was a time when every other person you’d meet would claim that they ‘used to hang out with Oli Sykes.’
Fast forward to 2022, and you’re sat in your overpriced 1 bed apartment, looking for something on TV to distract yourself from the impending destruction of modern-day mankind. You switch on the BRIT Awards and witness an ever-fresh-faced Ed Sheeran playing the opening bars to his smash hit ‘Bad Habits.’ Somewhat peculiarly he has a band with him tonight. We get through the first verse and into the pre-chorus and notice a sharply dressed Oliver Sykes looming in the background. What’s happening? Is this some sort of sick fever dream? The answer is no. It’s 2022, and Ed Sheeran and Bring Me The Horizon have teamed up, added breakdowns and screams to a mainstream pop track, AND IT’S ABSOLUTELY EPIC!
Sure, BMTH have adjusted their sound from the raw energy that was captured on ‘Count Your Blessings,’ but make no mistake, this is a huge victory not only for the band, but for all mid-2000’s alternative kids. The band that defined a disenfranchised generation, and were destined never to be appreciated by the mainstream, opened the biggest award show in British music!
With this massive step forward for alternative music, who knows what could be next? An Ed Sheeran death metal album? Harry Styles releasing a math-core project? Doja Cat donning corpse paint and recruiting Dimmu Borgir as her backing band? Whatever happens, metal and alternative music is on the rise again, and it’s a beautiful thing to see.