Instead, = settles for gently nudging at the boundaries of what he’s known for, most notably on the opening Tides, which thunders along, driven by distorted guitars and double-time drums, and closer Be Right Now, which arrives unexpectedly welded to a Giorgio Moroder-ish synth line. Its excursion into R&B territory, with Stop the Rain, is well turned rather than startling. It doesn’t feature anything as authentically head-turning as Sing, the brilliant Pharrell Williams-assisted single from 2014’s x that repositioned Sheeran as a pop artist rather than an acoustic troubadour. And not just in the sense that its huge success seems a matter of course, though the two singles that proceeded it, Bad Habits and Shivers, collectively spent 15 weeks at the top of the UK charts, the latter knocking the former off the No 1 spot. Sheeran can also console himself with the fact that, with =, he seems to have made an album that is critic-proof. He can console himself with the fact that this places him in an august lineage – previous incumbents have included Coldplay, Phil Collins, the Bee Gees, Paul McCartney in the wake of the Beatles’ split, and Simon and Garfunkel – the last so reviled that Paul Simon was booed off stage by the hippy crowd at a New York festival just as Bridge Over Troubled Water became the biggest-selling album of the year. A decade, four multi-platinum albums and umpteen hit singles later, he still is: no one seems to have come along to seize that particular position from him. As soon as Sheeran arrived in the mainstream consciousness he became subject to a particular kind of opprobrium that goes beyond bad reviews, to a point where dislike becomes performative and the artist in question a kind of living shorthand for all that’s wrong with popular music. Amid the lyrical declarations of love for his wife, there’s a line that seems to address his plethora of critics: “Sometimes,” he says, “the words cut deep.”Įven if you’re inclined to the belief that pop stars – particularly those who have shifted 150m records in the space of 10 years or whose last tour was the highest-grossing in history – should take their lumps when it comes to criticism, you can see why it might rankle him. It features a pummelling sub-bass and the sound of the singer-songwriter rapping, this time at warp-speed. E d Sheeran’s new album contains a song called 2step.