Atlantic Records
Grief and his wife’s brush with cancer inspired Sheeran to make this insular record with Aaron Dessner of the National. It’s downcast yet full of new ideas – but will fans take to it?
Ed Sheeran famously keeps one eye on the numbers. A decade ago, he established his trademark, a pop take on the sensitive singer-songwriter trope with a healthy relationship to rap and R&B that has allowed him to flit across genres, imposing his indelible style on everything from Afrobeats to Eminem and Bring Me the Horizon collaborations. It’s the smartest thing a pop star could do at the dawn of the streaming age, where success is tied to your ability to feature on as many genre-themed playlists as possible – a strategy borne out by Sheeran’s 150m record sales – but also proof of fairly absurd talent: if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. Under the circumstances, it’s hard not to be impressed by how wholeheartedly Sheeran has thrown himself into his fifth album, Subtract, a noticeably different prospect to previous albums.
He has not merely tapped Aaron Dessner of US indie band the National and co-producer of Taylor Swift’s folksy lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore to produce; he’s also eschewed his usual songwriting collaborators. Intriguingly, their absence hasn’t affected Sheeran’s commercial melodic facility: Colourblind seems as likely to soundtrack wedding first dances as Perfect or Thinking Out Loud; Curtains and Spark land their hooks quickly; the tune of Sycamore is disarmingly lovely. You even wonder if the songwriters-for-hire were holding him back: by far the least memorable song is the one pop super-producer Max Martin had a hand in, the underwhelming Eyes Closed; it’s conspicuously better when Sheeran tries something different, like the gorgeous, Beatles-y middle eight of Dusty.
