ellie goulding delirium deluxe edition target

It also does absolutely everything you might expect a mainstream pop album in 2015 to do, to the extent that you start feeling as if there might have been some kind of checklist in the studio: knowing musical reference to Uptown Funk? Tick. It’s punchily produced, and filled with smart, nagging little touches: the Police-like guitar figure that weaves through On My Mind, or Holding on for Life’s charming combination of faux-gospel chorus and the kind of jubilant piano line found on old house tracks.

You can see how this happened, but including a song that audibly rips off Love Me Like You Do on the same album that features Love Me Like You Do feels a little careless, and elsewhere Delirium isn’t a careless album at all. Indeed, so keen are Goulding and her team to replicate Love Me Like You Do’s impact that a track here called Something in the Way You Move has a virtually identical chorus. It takes as its starting point Goulding’s two most memorable hits to date: her EDM-inspired 2013 chart-topper Burn and the Max Martin-produced Love Me Like You Do, the latter a song that even a dedicated abhorrer of pop – self-styled Gruppenführer of True Fucking Satanic Metal, Calvin “Baphomet” Harris, for example – might be forced to agree is an extremely elegant illustration of the blue-chip songwriter-for-hire’s art.

It is indeed a pop album, and it is indeed big: 16 tracks in its standard edition, a staggering 25 tracks and 90 minutes in its deluxe format – longer than Prince’s Sign O’ the Times, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde or indeed Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans – with a certain grandiosity signalled by its introduction, which goes heavy on the operatic vocals. But leaving aside the pressing question of precisely what kind of music Ellie Goulding thinks she has been making for the past six years, it’s hard to argue with her description of Delirium.

Ellie goulding delirium deluxe edition target