Video: Bring Me The Horizon Join Ed Sheeran For “Bad Habits” at Last Night’s BRIT Awards

Last night saw England patting itself on the back for adding snotty pop vocals to other music at the BRIT Awards. Among the performers at the show was metal-loving pop star Ed Sheeran, who was joined onstage by former deathcore act Bring Me The Horizon (unexpectedly, according to the gobsmacked British news reports we’re seeing) to “heavy-up” a version of Sheeran’s song “Bad Habits.” You can watch video of the performance below.

As you can imagine, the song will make you feel embarrassed to watch, if only for the “urban” dance crew that the BRIT Awards employed (guys, the ’90s and early 2000s may be seeing a comeback musically, but a bunch of white people half-breakdancing in a shopping cart was not the thing we missed from that era). But that all pales in comparison to the track, which is an attempt to add metal to pop, which just sounds like, uh, modern pop? They basically got together to perform an Imagine Dragons track. It’s a lesson in both how guitar-oriented modern pop music has become and how shimmery and candy-coated the current generation of contemporary rock musicians are making their songs. That way, it’s all nothing!

This is obviously part of Ed Sheeran’s push towards rock and metal that he’s been seeding in the press of late. The pop singer mentioned in July of last year that he was a fan of death metal and would collaborate with Slipknot, which resulted in him apparently having chats with Cradle of Filth frontman Dani Filth about a possible team-up. So just know, it’s not just Sheeran — everyone is desperate for relevancy in this situation, from pop stars trying to grasp onto the current interest in “rock” to extreme metal musicians suddenly realizing that they’ve done all this fucking work and the only people who care are other sweaty, tattooed chuds.

Watch the mortifying performance below: