Today, Friday, April 21, 2023, Ed Sheeran has released a brand new single from his upcoming fifth studio album, – (Subtract). The song, which is first on the tracklist, is titled Boat and begins the star’s journey into the emotional backstory of the record that took up his time over the past few years.
Scroll down to watch the Boat music video.
Ed Sheeran previously announced that his fifth album, Subtract, will be hitting store shelves on May 5, 2023.
The highly-anticipated record is the follow-up to his fourth record, Equals – but it became more than Sheeran expected when he started recording the album.
Speaking in a statement about Subtract, he said: “At the start of 2022, a series of events changed my life, my mental health, and ultimately the way I viewed music and art. Writing songs is my therapy. It helps me make sense of my feelings. I wrote without thought of what the songs would be, I just wrote whatever tumbled out. And in just over a week, I replaced a decade’s worth of work with my deepest darkest thoughts.”
And, before long, things went from bad to worse for the singer. He revealed: “Within the space of a month, my pregnant wife got told she had a tumour, with no route to treatment until after the birth.”
He added: “My best friend Jamal, a brother to me, died suddenly,” referring to the sudden death of 31-year-old SBTV founder Jamal Edwards, who died of a heart attack on February 20, 2022.
Sheeran added that he found himself defending his songwriting integrity, referring to the plagiarism case that he endured and won in April 2022.
These life-changing experiences altered how Subtract would sound drastically.
Before that, he was trying to make “the perfect” acoustic album and had spent “a decade” working on it.
Subtract will be released on May 5, 2023.
