Watch 10-year-old ‘America’s Got Talent’ contestant perform Ed Sheeran and Bring Me The Horizon’s ‘Bad Habits’
A 10-year-old contestant on America’s Got Talent has covered Ed Sheeran‘s reworked, Bring Me The Horizon-assisted version of his song ‘Bad Habits’.
Sheeran first released ‘Bad Habits’ as a solo song in June 2021, forming the lead single for his fifth studio album ‘=’. In February of this year, however, the singer teamed up with Bring Me The Horizon for a reimagined version of the track, which the pair debuted as the opening acts at this year’s BRIT Awards.
Days later, Sheeran and Bring Me The Horizon officially released the alternative studio version of ‘Bad Habits’, drawing on the band’s significantly heavier sound, with new vocals from frontman Oli Sykes.
Now, 10-year-old Harper Jerret has offered her own take on the song, matching Sykes’ scream-laden vocals during a belting performance of ‘Bad Habits’ on the current season of America’s Got Talent. The rendition opens with Jerret sprawled on top of a digital flowerbed, progressively building to a thunderous chorus flanked by a live band. Watch that below.
The performance adds to Jerret’s repertoire of heavy metal covers, having become an internet sensation in July 2021 following her take on the Spiritbox track, ‘Holy Roller’. The cover — which was this year used as Jerret’s audition for America’s Got Talent — was noticed by Spiritbox themselves, who invited the young rocker on stage in June to perform ‘Holy Roller’ at their O2 Academy Islington show in London.
Jerret’s live performance of the reworked ‘Bad Habits’ aired days after Bring Me The Horizon played the song at this year’s Reading & Leeds music festival. As the headliners for the festival’s final day, Bring Me The Horizon enlisted Sheeran himself for the performance, who took to the Main Stage East as the set’s surprise guest.
Speaking of their headline slot at Reading & Leeds — which followed their debut performance at the festival in 2008 and a secret set in 2018 — Sykes told NME that the show was “genuinely amazing”. The frontman added: “It has been such a crazy journey for our band: you look back and think, ‘How the fuck did we manage to turn things around?’”.
In the same interview, Sykes said the collaboration with Sheeran arose out of the band’s openness to enlist featured artists on their 2020 album ‘Post Human: Survival Horror’. “Very early on, we decided that we were going to switch stuff up. And it paid off.”