Ed Sheeran - + (LP)

Ed Sheeran’s debut, +, landed on 9 September 2011 with the sort of quiet confidence that tends to outlast hype cycles. It arrived via Asylum and Atlantic, largely shaped at Sticky Studios in Surrey with producer Jake Gosling, and it still plays like a snapshot of a young songwriter who knew exactly what he wanted to say. If you’re only familiar with the stadium-sized hits that came later, this one can feel disarmingly intimate. The bones are acoustic guitar, close-mic’d vocals, a loop pedal sensibility, and the odd flourish of strings that sneaks up on you rather than grandstands.

The run of singles was impossible to miss. The A Team is the anchor, written after Sheeran played a gig for the homeless charity Crisis and met the woman who would inspire its sobering sketch. It went on to a Song of the Year nomination at the 2013 Grammys and remains one of his cleanest pieces of storytelling, every image economical, every rhyme gently placed. Lego House gave the album its soft-focus heart, and the video, with Rupert Grint playing a starstruck doppelgänger, became a pop culture moment in its own right. You Need Me, I Don’t Need You showed a different gear, all fast-tongued bravado over beatbox taps and percussive guitar, a calling card for what he could pull off live with little more than a mic and a pedalboard.

What makes + stick, though, are the album cuts that reveal a careful craftsman beneath the busker charm. Small Bump carries itself with fragile balance, tender but unsentimental, and lands as a story borrowed from life rather than melodrama. U.N.I. is a break-up song that resists fireworks, choosing details and pacing like someone in the next seat on the last train home. Give Me Love builds patiently until the vocal harmonies feel like they’re spilling into the room. Gosling’s production is never showy, but it’s tactile. You can almost hear fingers on strings and the air in the room at Sticky Studios, which is exactly what you want from a debut that put honesty in the foreground.

Reception at the time split the difference between admiration and scepticism, which is about right for a record this exposed. The UK press could be prickly, yet even the harsher reviews conceded the hooks. Listeners settled it anyway. The album went straight to number one on the UK chart, hung around for ages, and racked up multi-platinum sales. By the time Sheeran collected British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act at the 2012 Brit Awards, + felt less like a hopeful introduction and more like the first chapter of a juggernaut. Australia took to it, too, which you can still feel when a shop stereo cues Lego House and you see half the store mouthing the chorus without realising.

If you’re after Ed Sheeran vinyl, this is the one that earns its spins. The + vinyl pressing does justice to the spaces between the notes, that breathy hush before a chorus, the little squeak of a fret change. It’s the kind of record you can throw on a Sunday afternoon and let it fill the house slowly. And if you like crate-digging, copies still surface at your local Melbourne record store, though plenty of people buy Ed Sheeran records online now. There’s comfort in knowing that, if you’re browsing for vinyl records Australia wide, this album won’t be hard to find, and it rewards a full listen more than a playlist skim. For anyone assembling a shelf of Ed Sheeran albums on vinyl, + earns prime position because it sets the tone for everything that followed, only with fewer moving parts and more open space.

Part of the charm is how rooted it is in the way Sheeran was performing then. The loop pedal approach, the beatbox accents, the half-sung, half-rapped cadences, they weren’t production tricks so much as translation. You can tell these songs were road-tested in small rooms before they blossomed on bigger stages. There’s a tactile through-line from the busk to the board, and it makes + feel lived in.

More than a debut, + is a document of a songwriter learning that simplicity can be a superpower. It isn’t flawless, but the best bits have a warmth that hasn’t cooled. If you’re curious where the phenomenon started, this is the doorway. And if you’re looking to start or top up a collection, this is the Ed Sheeran vinyl you actually play, not just file away.