In an era when pop stars market themselves as one-of-a-kind superheroes, Ed Sheeran writes humble, catchy songs that don’t really call attention to who made them. He sings with the relatable raspiness of someone you might encounter in a pub; his lyrics celebrate normie romance, the kind that blooms outside a castle on a hill, rather than inside of one. His album titles—+, x, ÷, =, and now - (call it Subtract)—even suggest computation rather than art. Now that artificial intelligence can imitate Taylor Swift’s voice and Drake’s cadences, it raises the question: Couldn’t software that was trained on his voice replace him?

Obsolesce has been on Sheeran’s mind lately. In 2017, the heirs of the co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” filed a lawsuit claiming that Sheeran’s 2014 hit “Thinking Out Loud” copied the 1973 soul classic. Though a jury on Thursday ruled in Sheeran’s favor, the case—the latest in a string of plagiarism controversies for him over the years—clearly shook him: He said that if he lost in court, he’d simply quit making music. Most pop songwriting involves recycling and reinterpreting, but because Sheeran forgoes personality and spectacle, his influences have nowhere to hide in his music. Other stars’ hits have the subtle quality of feeling like they’ve always existed; Sheeran’s are overt about channeling familiar elements—be it an Elvis inflection or Bronski Beat riff—into a new sing-along. The copyright claims against him thus have felt like an existential attack, threatening to render invalid the very abilities that have made him successful for more than a decade.

Sheeran’s melancholy new album shows what happens when a man on a hot streak confronts the possibility of the end. In 2022, he faced not only legal troubles but also the death of a close friend (the music entrepreneur Jamal Edwards) and a cancer diagnosis for his wife, Cherry, who underwent “successful” surgery last June. A Disney+ documentary series accompanying the album depicts these developments as upending both Sheeran’s mental health and artistic outlook. In the series, he speaks nervously of an inevitable career “plateau,” and of recommitting to the idea of writing songs to please himself rather than the masses. But in sharing these anxieties, he’s also plainly trying to extend his appeal. “He wants to say to people, ‘I’m not just this music machine,’” Cherry says in the documentary. “‘I’m not just this robot that tries to get No. 1s.’ Like, ‘I’m a father, I’m a son, I’m a friend, I’m a husband.’”

To re-center himself as a person, he has re-centered himself as an acoustic balladeer, moving away from the rap-inflected radio bait of his previous few albums. But he’s gone classic in a decidedly modern way by working with Aaron Dessner, the multi-instrumentalist from The National who helped reboot Swift’s sound in 2020. Unlike other auteur producers like Jack Antonoff or Ariel Rechtshaid, Dessner is more of a collage artist than a pop wizard. His arrangements—which employ eerie strings, meditative guitars, and pitter-pattering percussion—work best as elegant frames for interesting songwriting. He has made Sheeran’s new album sound cold and wet, befitting lyrics about battling despair on the wintry English coast.

This approach sometimes pays off, conveying all-too-convincing fears and joys. The rumbling, hymn-like “Salt Water” conjures a stark sense of suspense—and eventual relief—as Sheeran shares a surprisingly vivid dream of suicide (“Now I’m standing on the edge, gazing into hell / Or is it somethin’ else?”). On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, “Dusty” blossoms from easygoing reggae-pop into ecstatic rock that captures the highs of early fatherhood. The Bon Iver–ish yowling of “Spark” and raggedly poignant chorus of “End of Youth” demonstrate that even when Sheeran’s mood is dampened, his ear for catchy hooks remains sharp.

[Read: The puzzling ubiquity of Ed Sheeran]

Yet Sheeran’s emotional excavation digs only so deep. The strong, concrete images (“the blackbirds, they fly / like a frown on the skyline”) are outnumbered by garbled, and often water-related, clichés (“I suppose I’ll sink like a stone / If you leave me now, oh, the storms will roll”). He sings of unresolvable sadness, yet all too eagerly circles back to self-help bromides (“Tears dry and will leave no trace and tomorrow’s another day”). The album won’t help him beat the copycat reputation, either. Particularly jarring are lyrics (“If we make it through this year / Then nothin’ can break us,” in “No Strings”) and arrangements (the strummy bonus track “Toughest”) that ape The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree—exactly the kind of brutal, personal, and wearily uplifting album that Sheeran seems to want to write. When Swift sought to enter a new chapter, she worked with Dessner to unlock a vibrant and uncompromising—yet still catchy—mode of storytelling. Sheeran hasn’t quite gotten there.

For most of the listening public, of course, blandness has never been an impediment to enjoying Sheeran’s music. Just as some of his old songs will forever be played at weddings, some of these new ones might well become memorial-service staples. But this time, he seems interested in more than immortality in the marketplace: “The album that I’ve made is about being honest,” he told the Australian radio DJ Zane Lowe in an interview. “I hope people just see me as a human being, and not a statistic-crazed pop monster.” The flaws of Subtract, in a way, serve that goal—anxiety and loss and similes about the ocean are generic to the human experience. But alas, if you’d told a neural network trained on Sheeran’s past work to make an album about grief, it might sound like this.