Ed Sheeran’s new album, Play, dropped today, featuring 13 tracks.
“Play is the album that made me fall back in love with having fun. Writing and recording Subtract was cathartic, but it was also heavy. Play is a celebration of love, life, culture, exploration, creativity. The last six months were exactly what I needed to find my rhythm again — to reignite my love for pop music,” Sheeran wrote on Instagram.
According to The Guardian, despite weaving in Indian and Persian influences, Sheeran’s eighth album marks something of a return to form after two records steeped in restrained melancholy, albeit ones with a few unexpected turns along the way.
His previous two albums, Subtract and Autumn Variations, underperformed commercially, each selling fewer than half a million copies. Both records grappled with heavy material — the death of his friend Jamal Edwards, and his wife Cherry’s cancer diagnosis and recovery. Chart success was never really the point of those songs, but for the first time in years, Sheeran found himself with something to prove. On the new record, he doesn’t waste time getting there, opening with a track bluntly titled “Opening”:
When your career’s on the line / Everything feels like a mistake / I’m still figuring out what to say
It’s a strikingly candid admission from one of his generation’s most commercially successful artists. And it raises an obvious question: what does Ed Sheeran sing about after the public turned away from his most personal work? Play spends its runtime circling that question. In the album’s press materials, he calls it a “direct response” to “the darkest period of my life.”
“After everything that happened, I just wanted to make something joyful and colorful, and dig into the cultures of the places I’d visited while touring,” he said.
Across all 13 tracks, Sheeran sings about escape and release, love and devotion — delicately but confidently, folding in Asian and Middle Eastern textures that expand his usual sonic palette.