Harry Styles sends greetings from yesterday from the present

It’s the soundtrack to Harry Styles’ half life: loud girl screams. From the age of sixteen, as a poster boy in the British boy band One Direction. And in the last five years as a solo artist, the massive cheers, screams and howls are even more and more persistent. Because of his singing, his unconcernedly handsome appearance, his flamboyantly feminine clothing style (glitter jumpsuits, costumes with colorful patterns, boas, tattoos as decals, a cover shoot in a dress in vogue, always colored nails) his lyrics and the casual quirky dances on his stadium tours. He’s touring America now, Europe in a month.

British Harry Styles, 28, who lives in Los Angeles, has become one of the biggest names in pop music. His timeless songs pave a cloud career path. From the rather unexpectedly launched softpop debut album Harry Styles (2017), with the piano ballad ‘Sign of the Times’ as a long melancholy atypical introduction, to the cheerful successor Fine Line (2019). The warm ‘Golden’, ‘Adore You’ and the Grammy-winning ‘Watermelon Sugar’ were all tracks that camped in the collective audience for weeks.

But when the silence became deafening in the corona pandemic, there was little to shine for a while. Like many concert-less artists, Styles was thrown back to himself: he spent a lot of time in England, went on solo road trips, forced to feel what really was his home and wrote songs in peace. Through acting (the thriller Don’t Worry Darling is approaching) love came into his life: director Olivia Wilde.

retro filter

Harry’s House, Style’s third solo album, as a musical field bouquet with a sensual retro filter, has just the right dose of intimacy intensified by the pandemic, with the slight bubble of early love. The title of the album is not only a Joni Mitchell song, but also a wink at the record Hosono House by Japanese pop artist Haruomi Hosono.

The doors of Harry’s House in this case open up to themes of growth, confidence and a more mature sitting back. These are the results of years of therapy, he recently said in an interview. With his regular team of writers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, who also recorded most of the songs, Harry Styles lets himself be heard less for the masses and more for himself.

Harry’s House in cleverly forged songs links the present to the deep admiration for music from the seventies and eighties: languid grooves, tingling synths, funky bass lines, fierce drums. He then continues with what is not expected of him, from disco influences to folk. Styles gives musical greetings from yesterday, but it is always slightly different.

The first single ‘As It Was’, about his parents’ divorce, is a brilliantly constructed pop song (now listened to over 470 million times on Spotify – a record† And opening track ‘Music for a Sushi Restaurant’ also builds incomparably to funk loaded with horns (that catchy bass line!) that there is no point in resisting. Soft rockers (‘Daylight’ and ‘Grapejuice’) are at odds with the acoustic gem ‘Boyfriends’, which, as witnessed by the live performance at pop festival Coachella, excels in vocal harmony. Lyrically, however, Styles’ charm offensive here is blankly compassionate slime dress.

No, then ‘Little Freak’ is more believable, and the tragically narrative ‘Mathilda’ can also be felt. Gently packing sadness into cheerful tunes, Styles can do it, with sometimes futile-looking details.