(Asylum/Atlantic)
Teaming with Taylor Swift’s recent producer, Aaron Dessner of the National, Sheeran strips things back – but only a little, and the chorus of this new single is as insistent as ever
Earlier this week, on a day when the former prime minister of the UK faced the House of Commons privileges committee in a hearing that could theoretically end his political career, one tabloid newspaper decided that the biggest story of the day was that Ed Sheeran no longer takes drugs (an admission he’d made during a lengthy interview with the US Rolling Stone magazine). That perhaps tells you something about said paper’s political allegiances and news values, but it also tells you something about Ed Sheeran: 12 years after his album + catapulted him into the mainstream consciousness in no uncertain terms – it ended up in the UK’s bestselling albums of the year chart for eight years in a row – he’s still an exceptionally big deal, big enough that a tabloid newspaper can just about get away with filleting a few quotes from a magazine feature and sticking them on the front page as a distraction tactic.
Times have changed, so have tastes – sweeping away a lot of the Sheeran-alikes that did good business in the wake of his initial success – but the definite article’s popularity seems almost impregnable. Carping voices, of which there are many whenever Sheeran’s name is mentioned, might point to the fact that his last album, =, didn’t sell as well in the US as its predecessors, but such things are very relative indeed: it went straight to No 1 there, sold 1.3m copies in 2021 alone and spawned five platinum or multi-platinum singles. Faced with failures that profitable, even the aforementioned carping voices might be forced to admit that Sheeran clearly has something the public want: a knack of writing songs that get under millions of skins, an innate understanding of mass taste, a formula for success.
