Dear Evan Hansen: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the soundtrack album to the 2021 film of the same name, released on September 24, 2021, by Interscope Records. Based on the eponymous stage musical by Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek, and Justin Paul, the film is directed by Stephen Chbosky, with Levenson writing the screenplay and stars Ben Platt in the titular role, reprising his role from the stage performance. The soundtrack featured most of the musical numbers from the stage play, performed by the film's ensemble cast members. Four songs were excluded from the album and instead cover versions of five of the numbers were included. Those versions were performed by Sam Smith, SZA, Summer Walker, Carrie Underwood, Dan + Shay, Finneas O'Connell and Tori Kelly. A new song "The Anonymous Ones" was co-written by Amandla Steinberg. The musical score is composed by Dan Romer and Justin Paul, and had jointly worked on producing the album with Alex Lacamoire, who worked on the Broadway cast recording of the musical and also acted as the music supervisor. Unlike the film, which received negative reviews, the album was well received and it debuted at the second position in Billboard's Top Soundtracks. The album was nominated for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards. Steinberg's "The Anonymous Ones", performed by her in the film and during the end credits by SZA, was shortlisted for Best Original Song category at the 94th Academy Awards, but could not get selected for the final list of nominations. Development In August 2020, it was confirmed that in addition to playing Alana Beck, Amandla Stenberg would collaborate with Pasek & Paul on the writing of a new song for her character. In August 2021, the title of this new song was revealed as "The Anonymous Ones". Stenberg, speaking to MTV News, had said that writing the song was mostly attributed on her being resonated with the character, "I really love the way it unfolded, because we were able to capture the thing we were talking about in all of our meetings together, which is the fact that we're all going through it". The track was sung by American Singer, SZA who instantly connected with the song and came with few demos of the track. She opined that her version was "completely different and new, but also really respectful to the original melody and lyrics