Ben Platt’s Powerful Debut Single 'Bad Habit' Will Give You Chills

Can anyone emote quite like Ben Platt? Known for his emotionally devastating efficiency in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway — which earned the singer a Tony, Grammy, and Emmy by the age of 25 — Platt is currently baring his own soul to the world with his forthcoming debut album, Sing to Me Instead.


On Friday (February 1), the performer released the initial two tracks from his first solo studio release, including its lead single, "Bad Habit." The piano ballad finds Platt yearning for a former love, the lingering thoughts of whom he can't seem to kick — like a bad habit. The song builds and ultimately swells to a crescendo of raw emotion and pitch-perfect vocals.


In the video, Platt sits at his piano and belts out the song, before taking a cab to a photo gallery full of snapshots from what seems to be a past relationship. It's an eas however deeply intimate look at a young artist shedding his skin for everyone to see.


Platt tells EW that Sing to Me Instead will chart the highs and lows of a relationship, starting at the end. "As the tracks progress, you go back to the starting of the relationship and visualize where the complications come from and what was the good and bad and what brought the singer to this place of feeling this addiction so deeply," he mentioned. “There’s reveling in the goodness of it and there’s the vindictive break-up of it all; there’s the feeling as it dissolves and attempting to hold onto it – all of the different stages I created from an amalgam of the relationships I’ve had in my life."


The second single, "Ease My Mind," is another piano-driven track, however this one finds the singer-songwriter initial up about an anxiety that only a lover can quell. The powerful song is tinged with R&B and gospel, and if it's indicative of what else we can expect from the 12-track LP, then we're certainly in.


Sing to Me Instead drops March 29 from Atlantic Records.