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.
Subtract’s insularity stems from a personal emergency Sheeran experienced last spring. It was initially meant to be an album of acoustic songs he had spent a decade sculpting, an idea he scrapped after the death of his friend Jamal Edwards, his wife Cherry Seaborn’s brush with cancer and a bruising copyright lawsuit over Shape of You. He started again, and the rush-written result is resolutely downcast and despondent, unlike any of his previous work. Dessner decks out the songs in tastefully muted shades, a sound familiar from Folklore’s softer moments: understated string arrangements; twinkling, spectral synthesisers; gentle breezes of feedback and reverb-drenched electric guitars, the sound of fingers scraping along the strings as loud as the notes. It’s atmospheric and beautifully done, although it can get monotonous: the full drum kit and distorted guitar that kick in on Curtains are curiously jolting.
Beyond Eyes Closed, presumably included as a commercial safe bet, Sheeran’s crowd-pleasing excesses are nowhere to be seen. There’s none of the gimlet-eyed fixation on trends that created 2021’s Bad Habits, a hit evidently modelled after the Weeknd’s record-breaking Blinding Lights. The Hills of Aberfeldy is faux Celtic folk, but those alert to the danger of Sheeran slipping once more into Galway Girl’s fiddle-de-de should be relieved that – like the folky melodies of Life Goes On and Salt Water – it feels darker and grittier, suggestive not of Sheeran courting a theme pub audience but tapping into a buried aspect of his musical DNA: around 2011, he was given to performing an a cappella version of the 19th-century folk song Wayfaring Stranger onstage. Meanwhile, on the forlorn End of Youth, you can hear him veering towards the hip-hop-influenced vocals familiar from Shape of You, but he never actually breaks into rapping, settling on a style with propulsive energy but none of the novelty aspect.
Sheeran is frequently mocked for writing in prosaic broad brushstrokes, but the lyrics here feel focused and painfully blunt: on End of Youth, he appears racked by self-doubt; Sycamore brings us into the doctor’s waiting room as he and Seaborn await her diagnosis. There are occasional cracks of light, as on Curtains, but more usually uncertainty and fatalism have to stand in for optimism: “What can you do but pray?” “I’m moving forward – but to where?” “I close my eyes and take one step and say ‘well, here it goes’.”
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Subtract should not be the stuff of fan-scaring reinvention. But Sheeran occupies the dead centre of the mainstream, where people want to know exactly what they’re getting: witness the relatively muted response to Adele’s only moderately different-sounding 30. Furthermore, its emotional tone is bound up with Sheeran’s story and it’s unclear how invested in his story his audience actually is: he is famously #relatable – a nice, ordinary bloke – but whether that means fans are fascinated by Sheeran per se, or merely Sheeran as a cipher for nice, ordinary people, is an interesting question: perhaps tellingly, the album’s second single, Boat, is his lowest-charting single in a decade. Subtract is easily his best album. But it’s also the first Ed Sheeran album since his debut for which you can’t confidently predict eye-watering commercial success.
This week Alexis listened to
Thundercat & Tame Impala – No More Lies
A collaboration that sounds like a perfect meeting of minds: Thundercat’s elastic funk bass and penchant for yacht rock seamlessly combines with Tame Impala’s smooth electronic psychedelia.