Who is Harry Styles, anyway? At the prow of the dreadnought that was One Direction, the now 23-year-old mouthed words and cavorted to pop music that was most often not of his own making. Styles – overexposed, yet unknowable – was always a staunch defender of the brand, particularly when 1D escapee Zayn Malik voiced his discomfort at the disconnect between the music he was making and the much cooler music he and his friends were listening to.
Turns out, there was a disconnect for Styles, too. Come-hither pop does not loom large on Harry Styles, the long-longed-for debut solo venture from the 1D heartthrob. Strummed ballads are the order of the day, as is rock, and MOR cuts that sound a tad too Gary Barlow, too soon – prematurely matured, perhaps. For all its racked bewailing of the times, lead single Sign of the Times even borrows its smouldering clifftop hygge-knit vibes from Take That’s Patience video.
Released into the wild earlier this week, the US market-facing Carolina has an unexpectedly rootsy feel, but just enough of a Beckish, Beatley twist to keep it from clanging too hard. A country-folk ballad, Two Ghosts, packs some good writing. “We’re not who we used to be,” breathes Styles, “We’re just two ghosts standing in the place of you and me/ Trying to remember what it feels like to have a heartbeat.”
But much stranger things erupt from fissures in the tracklisting. Kiwi is the album’s second-biggest jaw-drop, finding Styles gurgling at the antics of a wild woman as actual blues-rock churns below. Zayn and reinventor-in-chief Justin Bieber went maximum R&B when they tried to put their teeny pasts behind them. Styles doesn’t bother – unless you are counting Woman, a rhythmic slow jam that knocks the rest of the album into a cocked hat. “Voman!” rumbles Styles in a strange accent, “Vuh, vooman!” It’s a bitter grizzle about imagining your ex with someone else, and it is great.
As a recent interview tells it, this album was born as a song cycle about relationships. On that count, Harry Styles doesn’t disappoint – even if, overall, you wish this album rocked its innovations harder.
Styles, meanwhile, is either broken-hearted, pleading with uncommunicative girls (“comfortable silence is so overrated!”) or being willingly preyed upon by vamps. You also wish all these girls weren’t caricatures, and that someone like Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner – or maybe even the 1975’s Matt Healy – had sat Styles down for a chinwag about how to write about sexually forward women without resorting to cliche. Turns out, Only Angel’s protagonist is – yes – “a devil between the sheets”.
