Maybe you heard that Harry Styles has put out an album about being in love—specifically, with actress-director Olivia Wilde. The two have been papped at weddings and on yachts. Videos of her dancing at his shows have gone viral. He’s starring in a movie she is helming, Don’t Worry Darling, releasing this fall. And it is true that the singer’s new album, Harry’s House, out now, is full of mush, gush, and goo. “You know I love you baby,” he wails, shimmying bassline behind him, on opening song “Music For a Sushi Restaurant.” On the swanky “Cinema,” he admits, “I just think you’re cool.” (Moments later, a new lover’s doubt creeps in: “Do you think I’m cool too/Or am I too into you?”) The strutting “Late Night Talking” sees Styles promising comfort in the face of a broken camera or a stubbed toe.
You heard wrong, all the same.
Styles’s 2019 collection, Fine Line, pulsed with loneliness. Isolated by fame and a youth and young manhood spent on the road, the Technicolor set was startling and vulnerable. (Also, it sounded really freaking good.) But the world stopped in 2020, and the musician’s life of a night here before a flight to there and a show around the way screeched to a halt. He paused. Settled. Found himself “sitting in the garden,” tossing back a couple of glasses of wine with someone he, yes, loves. And while the domestic life of a 28-year-old rock god, as Harry’s House suggests, involves more side boob, sex in the kitchen, and cocaine on the table than that of the average bloke, he soon learned that the very thing that had eluded him for decade prior is, as he said in interview with Better Homes & Gardens, “an internal thing.” Or, in layman’s terms: home is where the heart is.
Harry’s House is an ode to the ordinary told through glinting '80s pop. A 13-song celebration of car rides, swimming pools, fried eggs, and toast. Of nice wine. Green tea. Light speed Internet. “There’s just no getting through,” he muses over a rubber-band beat on “Grapejuice,” “without you/A bottle of rouge.”
Styles has favoured collaboration with songwriter-producer Tyler Johnson (Taylor Swift, Cam) and Kid Harpoon (Florence + the Machine, Maggie Rogers) heavily during his solo career, and the three worked on Harry’s House near exclusively. Each song features Styles alongside one or both of their names in the writing credits; all production credits go to Johnson and Harpoon. Together, they swap much of the 1970s soft-rock sonics that defined Harry Styles, his 2017 solo debut, and Fine Line for clubbier, more synth-laden fare. Lead single “As It Was” bops with an unmistakable A-ha lean, while the explicit “Little Freak” swims in an ocean of soft atmospherics. “Music For a Sushi Restaurant” flirts with funk while “Daydreaming” goes all the way, sampling the Brothers Johnson’s 1978 track “Ain’t We Funkin’ Now.”
Elsewhere, they abandon their influences entirely and just get loud. John Mayer lends searing fretwork to the uber-elastic “Cinema” and “Daylight”; “Satellite,” which chugs towards a cacophony of thrashing electric guitars and drums across its four-minute runtime, doesn’t just rock—it flat out cooks.
Those who loved where Styles was need not worry entirely. The singer cribs more than the set’s name from Joni Mitchell’s 1975 folk- and jazz-mash-up, “Harry’s House/Centerpiece,” and the understated “Matilda” and lush “Boyfriends” will both surely be fan-favourite singalongs come tour time. But what makes the album irresistible is its newfound freeness. It’s fun. And more, it sounds like an artist who, 12 years into an already remarkable career, is just getting started. Harry’s home alright.
Madison Vain is the Digital Director at Esquire; a writer and editor living in New York, she previously worked at Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated.
