Ed Sheeran’s new single arrives at an interesting point in his career. His last albums, 2023’s Subtract and Autumn Variations, felt not unlike a riff on Taylor Swift’s pandemic-era Folklore and Evermore: two albums released in the same year, produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, a little woodier and more understated in tone than usual. Subtract in particular enjoyed the kind of critical acclaim that Sheeran’s work seldom attracts. They were also the first Sheeran albums not to yield a billion-streaming track: his commercial zenith, 2017’s Divide, contained five, among them Shape of You, one of only two songs in history have to topped 4bn streams on Spotify.
Maybe a muted commercial response was part of the plan (or rather, a relatively muted commercial response by Sheeran’s standards: Subtract still went to No 1 in 13 countries). Having spent a decade voraciously pursuing vast success – and shifting 200m albums in the process – perhaps Sheeran had decided the moment was right to deliberately pull back, to do precisely what he wanted regardless of the sales figures.
At first glance, Azizam seems like another supporting claim for that theory. It’s billed as a “cross-cultural collaboration”, an experiment in Persian music inspired by the Iranian heritage of Stockholm-based producer Ilya Salmanzadeh (co-author of hits including Sam Smith’s Unholy, Ellie Goulding’s Love Me Like You Do and Ariana Grande’s Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored). The title is Farsi for “my dear one”, and its cast list involves an array of musicians playing Middle Eastern instruments such at the daf and santur, as well as the Citizens of the World Choir, which is made up of refugees and their allies.
But once you hear the end result, it has pretty much the same relation to Persian music as Galway Girl did to sean-nós singing. There’s a noticeable lope to the rhythm that could well have its roots in Tehran, but could just as easily be an echo of the deathless glitterbeat that sprang out of early 70s glam. There’s a Middle Eastern cast to a counter-melody that appears during the chorus, but the rest is positively Anglo-Saxon: percussive acoustic guitar to the fore, a big chorus and a hearty vocal with lyrics about dancing with his wife.
Azizam does its job with the kind of ruthless efficiency you might expect from Sheeran in unabashed pop mode. It has a hook that fully digs into your brain the first time you hear it, and proves impossible to dislodge thereafter: whether you consider that delightful or insufferable will depend entirely on your previously established opinion of Sheeran and his work.
Whether it will restore him to the realm of billion-streamers is also open to question. Pop is widely held to have entered a new era, more brash and risky and characterful than the one that bore Sheeran to success in the first place, heralded by the rise of Chappell Roan and the success of Charli xcx’s Brat. But less widely reported is the fact that, new era or not, Sheeran still casts a long shadow over pop: Noah Kahan, Benson Boone and man currently at UK No 1, Alex Warren, have a considerable chunk of Sheeran in their musical DNA; Myles Smith, winner of the Rising Star award at this year’s Brits, seems to have modelled himself so closely that he’s even adopted Sheeran’s trademark short-scale acoustic guitar. You wouldn’t bank against Azizam muscling its way back to the top table.
• This article was amended on 4 April 2025. An earlier version made reference to the ghatam, a South Indian instrument, but described it as Middle Eastern.
