Ed Sheeran released his third studio album *÷* (read as ‘divide’) on Friday and everyone who cares is talking about it. And here I am.

I loved ‘Castle on the Hill,’ one of his two lead singles simultaneously released on 6 January. It’s a brilliant piece of classic rock blended with folk-pop genre. Its epic tales and chorus raised my expectations for yet another excellent collection. But ‘Divide,’ as a whole, almost disappointed. It’s a mixture of pop and folk music, moving back and forth, here and there. Among the rest, I already have favourites — think of “Perfect” or “Happier” — and a few others that haven’t resonated yet. But then, it’s Ed Sheeran.

You have to be one type of a genius singer-songwriter to come up with, to name a few, Justin Bieber’s ‘Love Yourself,’ Taylor Swift’s ‘Everything Has Changed’ or even ’I Was Made for Loving You’ of Tori Kelly; exactly what the twenty-six-year-old has done in the past few years.

But because his first two albums, + (read as ‘plus’) and x (read as ‘multiply’), were ridiculously vivid, those rare classics you play, from song one to last, without feeling the need to skip any track and press ‘Next’; and because ‘Divide’ is simply nothing close to, or better than, the previous two; or because it’s hard to follow this new dive into folk-type music right away, without having to recover from the two master-collections, it is impossible to easily realise we’re in March 2017 and music is moving on. But we’ll get used to it.

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