It looks like our boy Ed Sheeran might've fucked around and made a world music album. Eddy Ed has been touring stadiums around the planet for years now, and he's currently coming off of a last-minute Coachella gig and a cameo during Post Malone's headlining set. Sheeran's last album was 2023's Autumn Variations, a low-key acoustic affair that he recorded with the National's Bryce and Aaron Dessner. Today, Sheeran announces his plan to follow that album with a bigger, brighter new one called Play.
Play is not a track-for-track cover of the Moby album, and it's also not a part of the four-LP series of Sheeran blockbusters named after mathematical processes. Instead, Play is something that Sheeran recorded while touring all over the world and working with big-deal pop professionals. In an album trailer, he insists, "This is the most exciting thing I've done as an artist so far... The sounds are sounds that we don't use in Western pop music." Per a press release, the LP was "inspired in part by [Sheeran]'s exposure to Indian and Persian musical cultures -- and their surprising connections to the Irish folk tradition he grew up with, through shared scales, rhythms, and melodies." Here's what Sheeran says about it:
Play was an album that was made as a direct response to the darkest period of my life. Coming out of all of that, I just wanted to create joy and technicolour and explore cultures in the countries I was touring. I made this record all over the world, finished it in Goa, India, and had some of the most fun, explorative creative days of my life. It’s a real rollercoaster of emotions from start to finish; it encapsulates everything that I love about music and the fun in it but also where I am in life as a human, a partner, a father. Going into this album campaign, I said to myself, "I just want everything I do to be fun and playful" -- so that’s why we are building pubs for folk jams, doing gigs on open top buses, and singing in pink cowboy hats on bars. The older I get, the more I just want to enjoy things and savour the moments that are mad and chaotic.
Play includes "Azizam," the single that Sheeran recently debuted in a Tonight Show stunt. That one is named after the Persian term for "my dear," and it's partly inspired by producer ILYA's heritage. Along with the album announcement Sheeran's got a new single called "Old Phone." Sheeran recorded this one with ILYA and Blake Slatkin, and it's a sentimental acoustic song about getting all bummed out while going through an old phone. The man is nothing if not literal. Along with the single, Sheeran built a pop-up Old Phone Pub at Coachella and started an Instagram account full of photos taken from the titular old phone. Below, you will find "Old Phone" and the Play trailer and tracklist. The trailer has more clips from new songs, and he's rapping on at least one of them.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Opening"
02 "Sapphire"
03 "Azizam"
04 "Old Phone"
05 "Symmetry"
06 "Camera"
07 "In Other Words"
08 "A Little More"
09 "Slowly"
10 "Don’t Look Down"
11 "The Vow"
12 "For Always"
13 "Heaven"
Play is out 9/12 on Gingerbread Man/Atlantic/Warner.
