Play

About

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 song, 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 culture, and there are superstars in the same country with different language, and that’s super exciting as well,” he say. 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 ode, “In Other Words” and “For Alway,” also describe universal emotion. “They’re very human things that you go through with your partner or your kid,” he say. “There’s stuff that I can relate to with my friends going through the same thing. 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 experience.” .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

Start your shelf to read the full take →