Even at their most successful, Ed Sheeran albums are a mixed bag. 2017’s ‘÷’ (yes, the one that featured the barely believable ‘Galway Girl’) worked on its own terms because it was a more adventurous record than his critics would give him credit for. Among the usual saccharine acoustic ballads, the open-minded listener was invited to stumble across wailing dad-rock guitar, sprightly Ghanaian highlife and that admittedly queasy Irish jig.
You might not rate the results of these sonic explorations, but it’s better to live in a world where somebody as big as Sheeran is willing to play against type. Indeed, the Halifax-born, Suffolk-raised singer (who identifies “culturally as Irish”) really runs into trouble when he goes on autopilot. Take 2023’s ‘Autumn Variations’, a downcast collection that was about as drab as the tatty old mac you dragged out of the wardrobe as summer slunk off.
While he’s never been a critical darling, the reviews were particularly gruelling for what proved to be his lowest-charting album on the Billboard 200 in over a decade. Ed doesn’t see the point in music reviews, so he won’t have read them, but album eight coincidentally finds him ditching the beige sonic palette in favour of colourful pre-release singles ‘Azizam’ and ‘Sapphire’. These respectively Persian and Punjabi-inspired workouts (the latter a team-up with Indian playback superstar Arijit Singh) suggested that the 34-year-old had returned to his stylistic hopscotch. After all, it served him well in the past: ‘÷’ remains his biggest-selling album to date.
It’s dispiriting, then, when ‘Play’’s opening track – entitled, ingeniously, ‘Opening’ – starts off as yet another introspective, finger-picked ballad. The lyrics, though, are bracing enough to snuff out any cynicism: “I have cried at my brother’s grave / I have shaken hands with my wife’s surgeon.” Soon, too, comes a brittle beat as that fragile croon gives way to Ed’s breathless flow. It’s never not annoying to hear a white guy who went to prep school trying to rap, but, again, the words cut through. Seemingly referring to the plagiarism accusations he’s battled in recent years, Sheeran huffs: “Two of them tried it; I won both cases.”
While ‘Play’ directly addresses the life-threatening illness that Sheeran’s wife faced during pregnancy, as well as the death of his best friend Jamal Edwards (the entrepreneur behind rap channel SB.TV), this is the sound of someone rallying from the darkness. There’s a bit of agreeable, lightweight soul (‘A Little More’ and ‘The Vow’), some Bon Iver-style folktronica (‘Heaven’) and – no shit – a Fred Again-assisted psytrance banger (‘Don’t Look Down’) that could have been in the trailer for one of those ropey Matrix sequels in 2003.
Sheeran hasn’t committed as wholeheartedly to the genre-hopping bit as he did on ‘÷’. There are an awful lot of those sickly ballads, some of which are better than others: ‘Old Phone’, inspired by seeing an old text from Edwards, is genuinely moving. But ‘Play’, which apparently kicks off a groan-inducing new series of albums named after buttons on a remote control, just about makes the most of his bag of tricks.
