POP/ROCK

Ed Sheeran, "-"(Atlantic)

"-" (pronounced "subtract"), the fifth and last in Sheeran's series of arithmetic-titled albums, presents the 32-year-old fighting valiantly against forces that might undo him and his young family.

As detailed in a sympathetic Disney Plus docuseries, "The Sum of It All," Sheeran spent the first few months of 2022 confronting one trauma after another: the death of his close friend Jamal Edwards; a cancer diagnosis for his wife, Cherry Seaborn, while she was pregnant with the couple's second daughter; and a lawsuit alleging that he'd ripped off parts of another artist's song for his 2017 hit "Shape of You."

"It's been a long year and we're not even halfway there," he sings in "End of Youth," which defines adulthood as the point "when pain starts taking over."

Largely co-produced and co-written by the National's Aaron Dessner (whom Taylor Swift recommended after she worked with him on "Folklore" and "Evermore"), this album is deeply, almost proudly immersed in Sheeran's grief though he's forever seeking a path out of the agony and anger and anxiety; sometimes he even glimpses one, as in "Curtains," where he remembers that tears eventually dry without a trace.

For all the turmoil he describes, you wouldn't call the album raw. The sound is lush and haunting, with layers of strings, synths and acoustic guitar cradling Sheeran's close-miked vocals. Dessner crafted instrumental beds that he sent to Sheeran to write melodies and lyrics to, and sometimes the result seems to be giving more Aaron than Ed.

That's OK in the spectral "Colourblind" and the exquisite "Borderline"; it's more of a problem in the numbing home-goods rusticana of "No Strings," which makes you long for the sonic variety of Sheeran's other albums, where he'll toss off a blue-eyed soul jam or a facile little synth-pop number.

Lyrically, Sheeran has been sharper than he is here — lotta boats being battered by waves and fires lighting up the night sky. But Sheeran's singing, with its intricately bent notes and its sense of a sob held just in check, is so vivid that the truth of his experience always comes through.

MIKAEL WOOD, Los Angeles Times

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