The Ed Sheeran of old—the one who liked getting in drunken scraps and wrote sweet love songs to apologize for stumbling home late from the pub—might have turned Play into a drinking game: Every time he uses some kind of explosion as a metaphor, take a shot. If he mentions the stars, down your Guinness. Real drinkers can add references to heaven in there too, but I wouldn’t advise it. Some quick napkin math tells me that players of this game will have downed 13 shots in Play’s first 20 minutes.
Say what you will about Sheeran, but he has never sounded this lazy. For the first decade of his career, he used normal-guy drag to hide the kind of mercenary ambition that was seemingly only shared by his friend and collaborator Taylor Swift. He parlayed “The A Team,” an acoustic debut single about homelessness and crack addiction, into a couple of albums of rock-solid wedding standards, which belied a future interest in tasteless-but-effective genre fusion that led to high-risk, high-reward singles like “Shape of You,” “I Don’t Care,” and “Bad Habits.”
Sheeran’s great innovation was the realization that his extremely normal personal life—he married his high school sweetheart, only hangs out with childhood friends, and has spoken about shitting himself onstage—allowed him to take more brazen risks than other stars, like experimenting with grime and dancehall, or releasing a song with Cardi B in which she alleges that “Ed got a little jungle fever.” He was positioned not as a multimillionaire popstar, the kind of figure who might get dinged for globetrotting and trendhopping in search of the next No. 1, but an everyman listener—an average joe who enjoyed flicking through Latin trap, hip-hop, and stomp-clap-hey all the way to the bank.
By his own admission, Sheeran no longer has this kind of drive. “Pop is a young person’s game and you have to really, really be in it and want it,” he told The New York Times recently. “I’ve found myself stepping back more and more and being like, actually, I’m really valuing family.” Putting aside the work this does to undo the attempts of stars like Swift and Madonna to prove that pop is not exclusively a young person’s game, it also rings slightly hollow when listening to Play, which represents a clear retrenchment after 2023’s – and Autumn Variations, Sheeran’s first studio albums to not peak at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 since his 2011 debut.
This fact is likely anathema to Sheeran, a noted stats obsessive who expresses a desire to “keep this Usain pace” at the outset of Play. At the same time, you can hear that weariness all throughout Play, which often finds him going back to his two favourite wells—wedding songs and “global” bangers—without much of the energy or good humor that made him so popular to begin with. This clash of ambition and half-heartedness leaves Sheeran sounding exactly like the guy he always told you he wasn’t: The ultra-calculating pop star whose love of the game has been entirely subsumed by a need to maintain his perch.
That metamorphosis wasn’t necessarily a given: “Opening,” the first song on Play, is fascinatingly persnickety, hinting at new frictions in Sheeran’s life. It is good metatext, even if it is basically unlistenable as music. After a pretty acoustic folk fakeout, the track quickly swerves into some of Sheeran’s worst-ever rapping: “In this world, there’s no relaxin’/I’ve been here since migraine skankin’/Never been cool, but never been a has-been.” His Central Cee-ish soft rhyming of ridicule/applicable/formidable might have worked a little better if he didn’t attend the Swift school of rapping, ending lines with gratingly melodic upspeak and downspeak, as if he’s scared of losing track of the beat. Even so, his lyrics on “Opening” are revealing: He hints at fallings-out and wonders if he’s “lost his way,” admits his “career’s in a risky place,” emphasises that he doesn’t want history to “happen again” while staying wholly vague about what any of that might mean. It sets Sheeran up for an album that could grapple with his place in the world, the music industry, and his own social circle.
That album is emphatically not Play, though. When he does touch on the themes of “Opening,” it’s in remarkably maudlin ways. On the weepy stomp-clap number “Old Phone,” about finding a decade-old phone in a drawer, he lists the phone’s contents (“Conversations with my dead friends/Messages from all my exes”) before deciding that “I kinda think that this was best left in the past.” When he sings that he feels “an overwhelming sadness/Of all the friends I do not have left,” it just serves as a reminder of how literal Sheeran is as a songwriter: There’s no self-interrogation here, just a rote recount of a fairly common experience. Sheeran doesn’t currently own a phone, but if he did, he might understand that most people’s current phones are “so full of love, yet so full of hate.” (He might also have been able to ask Google AI for some examples of show-don’t-tell storytelling.) Of course, this puddle-deep analysis can only be maintained for so long; by the song’s bridge, he’s put the phone away, “from whence it came.”
“Old Phone”’s literal attempt to mine the past for inspiration is, at the very least, slightly new territory for Sheeran. On “Camera,” he taps back into the I-love-you-despite-your-flaws clichés of his One Direction co-write “Little Things” (“You think that you don’t have beauty-in-abundance but you do/That’s the truth”) before inverting the premise of his 2015 hit “Photograph”: “I don’t need a camera to capture this moment/I’ll remember how you look tonight for all my life.” But then again, isn’t it every childhood Clapton obsessive’s dream to one day rip off “Wonderful Tonight?” Again?
The box-ticking doesn’t end there: Play contains unworthy successors to both “Perfect” (“In Other Words”) and “Thinking Out Loud” (“The Vow,”) as well as “A Little More,” a vintage Sheeran breakup track in that it is too bilious by half. When he sings “I can’t call you crazy/’Cause you could be diagnosed” it reinforces two things we already knew about Sheeran: he's never been able to save any of his famous empathy for his exes, and he's never been able to really land a joke.
These obvious, odious songs pad out a couple of singles that vindicate my perhaps-unpopular feeling that Sheeran is at his most dynamic when drawing from nonwhite musical traditions. “Azizam,” named after an Iranian term meaning “my darling,” is his catchiest, most energized song since “Shape of You” thanks to its tight hook and producer Ilya’s subtle incorporation of unconventional rhythms and traditional Iranian instruments. “Sapphire,” a collaboration with the Punjabi superstar Arijit Singh, and “Symmetry,” built around a frisky, hypnotic tabla rhythm by Jayesh Kathak, are heavy-handed, but Sheeran’s sheer enthusiasm on each track—the same level of investment that made “South of the Border” work despite its profound cringe factor—sells them entirely. (I am almost certain that non-diasporic Indians will go crazy for these songs, and that’s before you factor in the appearance of Shah Rukh Khan, India’s Tom Cruise, in the video for “Sapphire.”)
These are the only songs on Play where Sheeran doesn’t sound like he’s going through the motions; he’s talked about finishing the album in Goa, and they’re sparky enough to make you wish he had done the whole album there. And of course, Sheeran is not “Mr. Political,” as he put it in 2017, but there is a bitter aftertaste to his collaborations with Indian and Iranian musicians on an album released just a day before more than 110,000 far-right anti-immigrant protesters roiled through the streets of London. These are escapist songs landing in inescapably awful times; Sheeran might be the only everyman in England who can ignore the fact that this kind of apolitical, commerce-minded Choose Love thinking ran out of steam a long time ago.
