After their performance at the 2022 BRIT Awards went viral on the Internet, Bring Me The Horizon and Ed Sheeran have indeed confirmed that they’ll be working on new music together. While varying opinions about the live performance itself have surfaced from fans and music critics, no matter what you think about the collaboration, it’s a huge positive for any fans of rock, metal, and beyond.
Speaking to The Daily Star recently (and transcribed by ThePRP), Ed Sheeran divulged more about how the collaboration happened – and that’s he’s been a fan of the band for a long time.
“We’re going to write a song together… playing with Bring Me The Horizon was a dream. I got in touch with Oli [Sykes, Bring Me The Horizon vocalist] and we were going to write together but then the pandemic happened, so we were in touch – I’ve been a fan for a long time.
Oddly enough that’s the kind of music I grew up listening to and had a Kerrang! subscription and I listened to it constantly.”
“I actually said ‘Bad Habits‘ would be a bit of wet fart if I was just going up there and playing it normally. The song is EDM and they’ve [Bring Me The Horizon] taken it and made it a whole new thing. I was just like, you know what, these guitars are going to be great. It was a week’s turnaround – we emailed each other two weeks ago, recorded it a week ago and rehearsed it three days ago.”
Now, more about why these kinds of collaborations are actually a good thing for the scene.
Honestly? It’s pretty silly to not be excited about what these sorts of collaborations can do for the scene. In particular, Ed Sheeran is one of the biggest artists in the world at this moment, and actually creating a song with Bring Me The Horizon would indeed help bring a lot of new fans into rock, metal, and beyond. There’s a saying that goes “a rising tide raises all ships”, and it’s pretty fitting in this case. When new fans discover a band as popular as Bring Me The Horizon, there’s a very good chance they’ll discover other adjacent bands in their genre (or similar ones) that helps the new listeners branch out.
What’s really interesting is that many of the music critics and music listeners complaining about collaborations like this (in the “stay in your lane” sort of way) would have said the same thing about Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” back in the day, or even the emergence of nu-metal or rock and EDM bands colliding. The genres might have changed and evolved, sure, but the criticisms are similar. Which is sad, because if you really like a genre of music but feel not enough people are discovering it, why wouldn’t you want more people to discover it through whatever means are necessary? Hip-hop and pop acts collaborate all the time and end up exposing new audiences to all kinds of stuff. If a band like Dropout Kings can gain a bigger audience from working with pop and electronic acts themselves, what’s stopping other similarly-sized rock and metal acts from doing the same thing?
