Play

Ed Sheeran used his last two albums as a bit of a genre cleanse. Now he’s ready for a full pop revival on his eighth full-length. “I think <i>-</i> [<i>Subtract</i>] and <i>Autumn Variations</i> were a really good circuit breaker for me to just be like, ‘I’m a singer-songwriter, I’m going to make singer-songwriter albums and I am going to dip in and out of things when I feel like it,’” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And I think that <i>Play</i> will be one of the last pop hurrahs that I’ll get away with.” <i>Play</i> inhabits a familiar but expanding sonic space in Sheeran’s oeuvre. For several songs, he relies heavily on diverse Eastern musical styles like the Bollywood-tinged “Sapphire”, the Persian-influenced “Azizam” and the Punjabi-inspired “Symmetry”. “I’m just exploring completely new different world and cultures, and there are superstars in the same country with different languages, and that’s super exciting as well,” he says. On tracks like “Old Phone” (a remembrance of lost friends that recalls the storytelling of “Castle on the Hill”) and “The Vow” (which harkens to “Perfect” and “Thinking Out Loud”), he throws back to the traditional Sheeran sound of old. Both deeply personal and <i>mostly</i> relatable, many cuts belie his devotion to his family and wife. Two sweetly romantic odes, “In Other Words” and “For Always”, also describe universal emotions. “They’re very human things that you go through with your partner or your kids,” he says. “There’s stuff that I can relate to with my friends going through the same things. I’m very vastly different in other areas of my life and things that I do, but I think when you are a partner and a father and a friend, you share many, many, many experiences.” But it’s the album’s first song “Opening” that may be more specific to Sheeran’s particular circumstances, taking a critical eye to his own international fame. “Not the pop star they say they prefer/Kept quiet but I came to be heard/Been a long time up top, but I ain’t complacent/If I look down, I can see replacements.” He’s not worried, though, about those deemed “the next Ed Sheeran”: “I just take them on tour.”