As he puts it on “The Joker and the Queen,” a music-box piano ditty on “=” that stretches a poker metaphor exhaustingly far, “When I fold, you see the best in me.”Īn Ed Sheeran album wouldn’t be complete without a mawkish tear-jerker, and here it’s “Visiting Hours,” as in, he wishes heaven had them. Where the Weeknd’s music often revels in decadence and nihilism, Sheeran’s depictions of wild nights are often accompanied by a potent dose of morning-after guilt and the eventual possibility of redemption - usually a kind of quasi-religious salvation that can be attained through the love of a good woman. But the retro aesthetic is most indebted to an album that is only a year and a half old, the Weeknd’s massively successful “After Hours.” His silhouette has lately cast a long shadow across his fellow male pop stars (Justin Bieber, the Kid Laroi), though it’s most apparent on Sheeran’s current hit, “Bad Habits,” a pulsating, strobe-lit lament in the tradition of a Weeknd song: “It started under neon lights and then it all got dark,” Sheeran sings, recounting another night of empty, bleary-eyed partying. While he works again with the writer and producer Johnny McDaid of Snow Patrol, he adds a new collaborator on more than half the tracks: Fred again., a British dance-music artist. More than any of his previous LPs, “=” finds Sheeran mining the slick, synthesized sounds of ’80s pop.
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