Ed Sheeran has never been one to sit still creatively, but with his upcoming album Play coming out September 12 and available for preorder now via Gingerbread Man Records/Atlantic, he’s truly spinning the globe and pressing reset. The newly announced record, Sheeran’s first major release since closing the book on his decade-long Mathematics series, marks a bold and joy-filled new chapter for the multiple-GRAMMY winner.
To kick off the Play era, Sheeran has dropped “Old Phone,” a wistful, acoustic-driven ballad that finds him powering up a long-forgotten mobile and reliving texts from past loves and lost friends. Co-produced by Blake Slatkin and Ilya Salmanzadeh, the song is steeped in Sheeran’s signature blend of raw lyricism and earworm melody, and it feels both heartbreakingly intimate and instantly familiar.
The track was first teased in true Sheeran fashion via a surprise performance at his DIY pub during Coachella and Nashville’s Santa’s Pub, where he shared the stage with Noah Kahan. But the real twist? A spontaneous acoustic snippet on The Tonight Show couch with Jimmy Fallon. In a clip that quickly went viral, Sheeran not only played a few bars of “Old Phone,” but casually dropped the names of four upcoming albums. The internet, predictably, exploded.
But Play isn’t just another Sheeran record; it’s a passport-stamped, genre-bending odyssey. Written across continents and finished in Goa, India, the album explores the sonic threads that connect Indian, Persian, and Irish folk traditions. “I just wanted to create joy and technicolour,” Sheeran shared in a statement, calling the project “a real rollercoaster of emotions” that reflects his life as “a human, a partner, a father.”
From the euphoric swirl of “Azizam” to stripped-back moments like “The Vow” and “Heaven,” Play is Sheeran’s most eclectic project yet. But even as he experiments, he never loses sight of his roots – those quiet, acoustic corners where heartbreak meets harmony.
The tracklist promises a sweeping journey:
- Opening
- Sapphire
- Azizam
- Old Phone
- Symmetry
- Camera
- In Other Words
- A Little More
- Slowly
- Don’t Look Down
- The Vow
- For Always
- Heaven
In true Sheeran fashion, he’s bringing the Play concept to life with a sense of whimsy and spontaneity. “We’re building pubs for folk jams, doing gigs on open-top buses, and singing in pink cowboy hats on bars,” he says.
“The older I get the more I just want to enjoy things, and savour the moments that are mad and chaotic.”
To accompany the release of “Old Phone,” Sheeran also launched a nostalgia-fueled Instagram account, @teddysoldphone, filled with never-before-seen photos from the real phone he abandoned in 2015. It’s a literal time capsule—and a fitting metaphor for an album that looks to the past to chart a new path forward.
Play is available for pre-order now. Until then, you can find Sheeran somewhere between a folk jam and a karaoke bar, making music that, finally, feels fun again.
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