When Sheeran announced this album in March, he said pretty candidly: “For the first time I’m not trying to craft an album people will like I’m merely putting something out that’s honest and true to where I am in my adult life.” Sheeran gives short shrift to the music critics who have often dismissed him – “Why do you need to read a review? Listen to it. It’s doleful and downbeat, melancholy and heartfelt, and doesn’t contain anything as crass as 2017’s cod-Irish folk song ‘Galway Girl’. But ‘-’ (pronounced Subtract), the fifth and final album of the so-called “mathematical era” that essentially covers Sheeran’s entire major label career, definitely feels different. He trailed his second album, 2014’s ‘x’, with an R&B banger co-written by Pharrell Williams (‘Sing’) and launched his fourth, 2021’s ‘=’, with an electro bop (‘Bad Habits’) that owed an equal debt to The Weekend and ’80s synth-pop group Bronski Beat. For an artist initially pegged as an acoustic troubadour – albeit one with a foot in the grime world – Ed Sheeran has displayed an impressive ability to expand and remodel his sound.
