“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.
Play ends with “Heaven,” one of the album’s strongest songs, and also the song that best encapsulates all its problems. On one hand, it taps into a narrative that’s dogged Sheeran through his entire career: He may have “won both cases,” as he raps on “Opening,” referring to copyright infringement cases he won in 2023 and 2024, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of Sheeran’s music bears uncanny resemblance to other hits, and this one is fairly similar to both Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” and Charli XCX’s “Everything Is Romantic.” On the other hand, its combination of an easy ghatam-led groove and sweetly generic lyrics seems to find a healthy middle ground between the innovation that Sheeran says he’s too old for and the timeworn cliché that sounds so stale on the rest of the album. Then again, attentive listeners might find repetition of the same old images too much to bear when he drops lines like “Chemicals bursting, exploding/As every second’s unfolding.” Take a double shot.
All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
