"The Ed Sheeran of old-the one who liked getting in drunken scraps and wrote sweet love songs to apologize for stumbling home late from the pub-might have turned Play into a drinking game: Every time he uses some kind of explosion as a metaphor, take a shot. If he mentions the stars, down your Guinness. Real drinkers can add references to heaven in there too, but I wouldn't advise it."
"Say what you will about Sheeran, but he has never sounded this lazy. For the first decade of his career, he used normal-guy drag to hide the kind of mercenary ambition that was seemingly only shared by his friend and collaborator Taylor Swift. He parlayed " The A Team," an acoustic debut single about homelessness and crack addiction, into a couple of albums of rock-solid wedding standards, which belied a future interest in tasteless-but-effective genre fusion"
Play is sweetly generic and half-heartedly ambitious, delivering a few surefire hits while sounding unusually lazy overall. The album leans on clichéd metaphors—explosions, stars, and heaven—prompting a tongue-in-cheek tally that amounts to 13 shots in the first 20 minutes. Early career moves transformed "The A Team" into albums of wedding-ready balladry and then into bold genre mashups that produced major hits like "Shape of You," "I Don't Care," and "Bad Habits." The established everyman image enabled risk-taking and cross-genre collaboration, positioning the artist as relatable while pursuing commercial experimentation.
Read at Pitchfork
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