Ed Sheeran

Sheeran's career got moving fast. In early 2011, he independently released the No. 5 Collaborations Project EP, which caught enough attention to land him a deal with Asylum Records. His debut album, + (pronounced 'plus'), followed in September 2011 — it topped charts in both the UK and Australia, reached number five in the US, and eventually earned eight-times platinum certification in the UK (Wikipedia). The single 'The A Team' won him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically, and when it was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, he performed it live with Elton John. Not a bad first act. The breakthrough everyone points to, though, is x (pronounced 'multiply'), released June 2014. It hit number one in both the UK and the US, became the second-best-selling album worldwide of 2015, and produced 'Thinking Out Loud' — a song that won him two Grammy Awards at the 2016 ceremony: Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. He also picked up the Brit Award for Album of the Year in 2015 and the Ivor Novello Award for Songwriter of the Year that same year (Wikipedia). Then came ÷ (pronounced 'divide') in March 2017, and things got genuinely record-breaking. 'Shape of You' and 'Castle on the Hill' dropped simultaneously in January 2017, making Sheeran the first artist to debut two songs in the US top 10 in the same week — and by March 2017, he'd accumulated ten top 10 UK singles from a single album, a record at the time. 'Perfect' reached number one in the US, Australia, and the UK, where it became the Christmas number one in 2017. His fourth studio album, No.6 Collaborations Project, arrived in 2019 and debuted at number one in both the UK and US (Wikipedia/TMDB). On the acting side, that same year brought Yesterday, his most substantial film role to date — a film in which he essentially plays a version of himself in a world where he's inexplicably more famous than the Beatles.