The UK’s biggest pop star returns, singing of compulsive hedonism over 80s dance-pop – remind you of anyone?
Spotify has chosen to promote Ed Sheeran’s new single by sitting it at the head of a playlist of his previous hits. The “plays” column of the latter makes for mind-boggling reading: the figures look less like streaming statistics and more like long-distance phone numbers. Every track is immediately recognisable – you could have spent your every waking hour engaged in a dogged attempt to avoid the music of Ed Sheeran and you’d still know exactly what they were and who they were by within seconds of them starting. He’s spent the last decade enjoying the kind of success that, in one sense at least, brooks no argument: even his loudest detractor couldn’t argue against his ability to write one song after another that attains a weird kind of omnipresence, hits that evolve into inescapable facts of daily life.
This is not a state of affairs that Bad Habits looks likely to change. That Sheeran has trailed it as a “surprise” and “mad” tells you more about his innate populism than the song itself: it’s a well-written, extremely commercial pop song, cowritten by regular collaborators Fred Gibson and Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid, the latter of whom also had a hand in earlier Sheeran hits Shape of You, Photograph and Bloodstream.
