What the song is about
The title does the work. Azizam (عزیزم) is the everyday Persian endearment: aziz means dear or precious, and the -am ending means “my”. It is what you call a partner, a child, a close friend. Sheeran sings it to one person, and he has said who: the song was inspired by his wife and their love. The lyric is an invitation to dance with him, and the rest is the usual Sheeran register of devotion, without the melancholy of “Perfect” or “Thinking Out Loud”.
What makes it different is where the invitation is set. “I wrote ‘Azizam’ after Ilya suggested trying out making music inspired by his Persian heritage and culture,” Sheeran said when the song came out. So the record carries a daf frame drum, a santur (a hammered dulcimer), a ghatam and a lute, played by Iranian and Indian musicians, with Persian backing vocals, underneath a chorus built for a wedding dance floor. It is not a Persian song; it is an English pop song that borrows a room.
Not every critic was persuaded by the borrowing. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote that it “has pretty much the same relation to Persian music as ‘Galway Girl’ did to sean-nós singing”, and that once the instruments are set aside, “the rest is positively Anglo-Saxon”. That is a fair description of the method, which is the same one Sheeran used for his Irish and African excursions: a local colour, a familiar song.
How it was made
“Azizam” was released on 4 April 2025 through Sheeran's own Gingerbread Man Records with Atlantic, as the first single from Play, his eighth studio album, which followed in September. It was written and produced by Sheeran with Ilya Salmanzadeh, the Swedish-Iranian producer behind hits for Ariana Grande and the Weeknd, and with his long-time collaborators Johnny McDaid of Snow Patrol and Savan Kotecha.
Two weeks after the single, on 18 April, a Persian-language version arrived with Googoosh, the most famous singer in Iran's history, who was banned from performing there after the 1979 revolution and has lived in exile since 2000. Her presence is the record's real cultural statement, more than any instrument on it. Later in the year a Polish version followed, the result of a bet with a Polish influencer.
What it did on the charts
It went to No. 3 in the UK, No. 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 17 on the Global 200, and to No. 1 in the Netherlands and Belgium, with top-ten peaks in Germany (No. 6), Switzerland (No. 3), Sweden (No. 7) and Denmark (No. 9). It is certified Diamond in France and Platinum in the UK, Canada, Australia (twice), Denmark, New Zealand and Poland. It won International Hit of the Year at the 2025 NRJ Music Awards and was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2026 Brit Awards.
Who is Ed Sheeran?
Ed Sheeran, from Framlingham in Suffolk, went from busking and a self-released EP to the most-streamed artist of the 2010s on the strength of songs he writes himself, usually with a loop pedal and one or two co-writers. His run of albums named after mathematical symbols ended with Subtract in 2023; Play began a new series named after the buttons on a cassette player. The site also explains “Shape of You”, “Perfect”, “Thinking Out Loud”, “The A Team” and “Sapphire”, the second single from Play.
The video
The official video premiered on 17 April 2025. It was shot in south London in February by the Iranian-American director Saman Kesh and stages a Persian wedding, with Googoosh, the singer Andy and the comedian Omid Djalili among the guests. A simpler “Pink Heart” video by Liam Pethick had accompanied the release two weeks earlier.
The official video, on Ed Sheeran's channel.