With less than two months to go before the arrival of Ed Sheeran‘s Subtract, the singer revealed on Thursday (March 9) when the project’s first single, “Eyes Closed,” is scheduled to arrive.
“Eyes Closed. 24.03.23 (March 24),” Sheeran captioned a video of himself on Instagram playing the song on the piano, adding that fans can catch another preview of the track over on his TikTok account with a separate video of him performing the song’s parts in a duet with himself.
“So I’m dancing with my eyes closed/ Cause everywhere I look I still see you/ Time is moving so slow/ And I don’t know what else that I can do/ So I’ll keep dancing with my eyes closed/ Oh I keep dancing with my eyes closed,” he passionately sings, while playing acoustic guitar.
“Eyes Closed” will be the first track released from Subtract (or as Sheeran prefers to stylize it, –). The four-time Grammy winner revealed the final album in his decade-long mathematics era — previous installments are 2011’s +, 2014’s x, 2017’s ÷ and 2021’s = — on March 1, stating that the forthcoming LP came to be after a series of difficult, personal events impacted his life.
“I had been working on Subtract for a decade, trying to sculpt the perfect acoustic album, writing and recording hundreds of songs with a clear vision of what I thought it should be. Then at the start of 2022, a series of events changed my life, my mental health, and ultimately the way I viewed music and art,” he shared in the album announcement. He added that “in just over a week, I replaced a decade’s worth of work with my deepest darkest thoughts.”
“Within the space of a month, my pregnant wife got told she had a tumor, with no route to treatment until after the birth,” Sheeran continued. “My best friend Jamal, a brother to me, died suddenly and I found myself standing in court defending my integrity and career as a songwriter. I was spiraling through fear, depression and anxiety.”
In light of the events, the singer-songwriter stated that Subtract is an album of him making songs “that’s honest and true to where I am in my adult life” for the first time.
Subtract will arrive on May 5. Listen to the first snippet of “Eyes Closed” below.
