As I finished writing this review, the news broke that Ed Sheeran had been cleared of infringing copyright in his latest high-profile trial, one that has been so frustrating that the singer-songwriter threatened to “quit music” if the courts didn’t find in his favour. He is also mourning the recent death of his Irish grandmother, the subject of his 2017 song Galway Girl. Appositely, the British singer-songwriter’s fifth studio album details what an absolute humdinger your early 30s can be. Billed as his starkest and most candid record yet, – (AKA Subtract) concludes Sheeran’s run of mathematically themed albums with a diaristic account of how slings and arrows can come at a successful singer-songwriter, often out of nowhere.
The title suits the contents. There is one major loss at the heart of this record, and some near misses; you may consider Sheeran’s recent period of depression – another of Subtract’s recurrent themes – as a kind of defining emptiness around which the album orbits. The most obvious absence in these 14 tracks is that of Jamal Edwards, the late SBTV founder who died suddenly in January 2022. He and Sheeran had been close, to the point where many had wondered if they were more than friends – a rumour Sheeran can now chuckle fondly over in interviews. A grime entrepreneur whose DIY YouTube channel did much to crowbar Black British music towards the mainstream, Edwards’s early support lent the singer-songwriter no little credibility, often in short supply from other quarters.
Although it does not appear on the album, Sheeran’s one-off track – the freestyle rap F64, released in January – made it plain that his feelings about Edwards’s death were still raw. Eyes Closed, a mid-tempo album song about going out to numb your pain, also nods to the abrupt loss of Edwards (“no one is ever ready”) while remaining broad enough to encompass all sorts of heartache. Universals wrapped in specifics remain a constant in Sheeran’s everyman offering.
One of the reasons he remains popular is that Sheeran is a songsmith who follows the Ernest Hemingway line that straightforward writing is often the most effective writing. “Life just goes on,” he notes in the lyrics to Eyes Closed – a theme he picks up on again on the following track, Life Goes On. Throughout the first half of the record, bereavement and Sheeran’s mental health elicit watery metaphors; songs called Salt Water and Boat. The latter is defiant – “the waves won’t break my boat”, he sings, as the song’s elements rise and ebb around him. The former, though, hints at suicidal feelings.
Edwards’s death came on top of other challenging life events: while pregnant with their second child, Sheeran’s wife was diagnosed with a tumour that could not be treated until the baby was born. (“She’ll be fine, she’ll be fine,” he self-soothes on Vega, and she was.) All the while, Sheeran was in the midst of a previous copyright trial, over his 2017 song Shape of You. Last year, the courts found in his favour, but the singer-songwriter, along with his co-creators, released a statement detailing the toll the trial took on their personal lives and mental health.
If, until now, Sheeran’s albums have been replete with a number of mostly youthful themes, Subtract is palpably a grownup record on which he swings from coping to not coping. The album’s bleakest song, End of Youth, details a number of bitter reckonings through his rap-adjacent flow. Curtains, which boasts some electric guitar, is a song about hauling yourself tentatively out of a dark place.
Artistically, things are less clear cut. If this is not a time for frisky, funky percussion, the watery tropes on these songs are matched by the album’s misty sound. Like his friend Taylor Swift, Sheeran has turned to US producer Aaron Dessner (the National) to craft the feel of Subtract. No one is ever going to accuse Dessner of copying Marvin Gaye – the substance of this most recent copyright trial – for one. The producer is feted for his ability to make everything he touches into a watercolour, adding ill-defined keyboard washes, light strings and sometimes muted beats, as though from a drum kit two streets away, on many of these tracks. While gossamer textures are no bad things in themselves – there’s a lovely pedal-steel-like sigh on Spark – Dessner’s work is most often polite rather than convincingly liminal.
Two tracks break this mould. The melodic structures and hovering drones of album closer The Hills of Aberfeldy nod, accurately, at Celtic traditionals. The perkier, more pointillist Dusty supplies a little sunshine through rain, finding Sheeran happily playing Dusty Springfield to his young daughter and ruefully noting that “nothing [is] static”.
Other artists have framed grief and depression in gauzy, eerie sound clouds before, but this is not the avant garde work of someone such as Warren Ellis, whose pellucid, orchestral electronics accompanied the cosmic grief of Nick Cave’s Ghosteen and Carnage albums. That said, this generation’s songwriter-in-chief is ideally placed to reopen the discussion around male mental health. And if these songs speak directly and compassionately to people’s own struggles, then they earn their place in the canon.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
