Harry Styles stakes claim as perfect boyfriend and pop star
On “Boyfriends” — an acoustic ballad from his new album, “Harry’s House” — Harry Styles runs down some of the many reasons such figures are to be avoided.
“They take you for granted,” he sings, close-harmonizing with himself like a one-man Crosby, Stills & Nash. They call only when they “don’t want to be alone.” Worst of all, he points out, they start “secretly drinking,” at which point it “gets hard to know” what they’re thinking.
The tune’s unspoken promise, of course, is that Styles is different — that, given the chance, he’d prove an exception to the rule that men are trash. And indeed the rest of the recently released “Harry’s House” is filled with tender assurances of his emotional availability (not to mention his erotic ingenuity).
“If I was a bluebird/ I would fly to you,” he croons over a jaunty synth riff in “Daylight,” “You’d be the spoon/ Dip you in honey so I could be sticking to you.”
Yet the note of allyship he strikes in “Boyfriends,” in which he carefully avoids gendering the person he’s addressing, feels crucial to the whole Harry Styles enterprise; it’s what sets him apart from teen idols who’ve preceded him — and part of what has made him as much a kind of woke Gen Z thought leader as a vest-with-noshirt heartthrob.
Styles — the 28-yearold who found fame in the boy band One Direction before striking out as a solo act — stands for inclusion and respect and sensitivity. Our man Harry gets it,
is the thing; he’s someone to confide in and someone to drool over, a new-school dreamboat who has defined his sexual identity vaguely enough to allow anyone interested to climb aboard.
On his first two solo
LPS, Styles’ music — a crafty pastiche of crinkly dad-rock signifiers — distinguished him from the likes of Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber. This time, a few rustic slow ones aside, he has moved forward from the 1960s and ’70s to embrace the same ’80s sounds many of his peers have: “As It Was,” the album’s hit lead single, cribs the tick-tocking
A-ha groove the Weeknd borrowed for “Blinding Lights”; “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” has a rubbery bass line and bleating Fine Young Cannibals horns.
Throughout “Harry’s House,” Styles’ longtime producers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson pile on the glimmering keyboards and booming drums and scrubbing post-disco guitars; John Mayer drops by to lend tasty licks to “Cinema” and “Daydreaming.” (Other guests include Pino Palladino, Ben Harper and Dev Hynes of Blood Orange.) Vocally, Styles shifts easily between a cooled-out croon and a hot-and-bothered yowl, a husky lower register for early morning pillow talk and an airy falsetto to show he doesn’t care who knows how he feels.
If Styles’ production choices have moved him closer to the Top 40 mainstream, his lyrical approach has grown more idiosyncratic. It could be hard to glean much of a sense of Styles’ inner life from his early stuff, but these songs are rich with vivid and intimate details.
“Harry’s House” is definitely Styles’ horniest album yet; “Little Freak” mentions a “wet dream just dangling,” while “Cinema” has him deciding, “If you’re getting yourself wet for me, I guess you’re all mine.” Yet as the LP’S title suggests, Styles is also in a homey state of mind; he keeps sketching cozy domestic scenes set in kitchens and gardens and bedrooms. “Keep Driving” recounts a road trip for two by stringing together a bunch of images including “passports in foot wells,” “riot America,” “cocaine” and “side boob.” Not sure what exactly it all adds up to, but that’s a vibe, no question.
The album’s most moving moment comes at the end of what Styles delineates in the liner notes as Side A. (Old dad-rock habits die hard.) Not unlike Olivia Rodrigo’s “Hope Ur OK,” “Matilda” counsels a pal who has been abused that she’s entitled to cut the family members who’ve harmed her out of her life: “You don’t have to be sorry for leaving and growing up,” he tells her over fingerpicked acoustic guitar, “Anywhere you go, you don’t need a reason/
’Cause they never showed you love.”
As pop star empathizers go, he’s up there with the best.