“Telling those stories we already told, / ’Cause we don’t say what we really mean.” And in “From the Dining Table,” a stripped-back track that would not feel out of place on a Bon Iver album, “We haven’t spoke since you went away / Comfortable silence is so overrated.”īecause his lyricism is deeply coded, even veiled details feel like intimate confession. “Tongue-tied like we’ve never known,” he croons in “Two Ghosts,” a twangy requiem for lost love. “We don’t talk enough,” he belts in “Sign of the Times,” the nearly six-minute, classic rock first single off the album. As a PR-trained pop star, he is a practiced hand at concealing hard facts with metaphor, dodging probing interview questions with diplomatic answers and winsome charm. For Styles, it manifests in a tight control over his privacy, over what the public gets to know about him. There’s an art to reconciling all of these identities. There’s boyband Harry and solo Harry-long-haired, quirky introvert and womanizing hard rocker charismatic, friendly teen idol and newly minted Hollywood actor. In the nest of these apparent contradictions, Styles negotiates the incongruity between the images of Harry Styles, past, present, and future. The girl in “Carolina” has “a book for every situation” and “gets into parties without an invitation.” The muse for “Only Angel” is secretly “a devil between the sheets” in “a skirt that short.” And the disembodied “pretty face on a pretty neck” in “Kiwi” “worked her way through a cheap pack of cigarettes,” “in a black dress, she’s such an actress.” It’s disappointing that Styles, outspoken in interviews in his unrelenting support of teenage girls, buys into chauvinistic tropes. Women on the album tend to fall into hard rock archetypes. If that sounds like a departure from One Direction, his lyricism is also a far cry from hey-girls and yeah-yeahs-but sometimes it’s for the worse. “Woman” builds the most eccentric soundscape of the record, one that opens with a voice talking about Netflix rom-coms and includes distorted electric guitar, a syncopated reggae beat, and even a synthesized duck noise. That’s not to say that he never branches out on his own. In “Kiwi,” he tries on the Stones’ rock n’ roll sleaze, emulating the electric guitar riffs of “Gimme Shelter” and “Start Me Up.” And “Sweet Creature” adopts finger-plucked, acoustic guitar in G major-the same key, and nearly the same tempo, in which Paul McCartney wrote and sang “Blackbird.” With a vocal versatility that lends itself as easily to slow guitar ballads as it does classic British rock, Styles makes it hard to deny the recognition of his talent and musical ear. In the record that seeks to establish him as a serious musician, the ex-boybander tries on the musical styles of his predecessors like patterned, designer-brand suits. But in his self-titled debut album-his first release since British boyband One Direction went on hiatus-Harry Styles demonstrates a remarkable willingness to try anything and everything. It is an intensely risky decision, both professionally and personally, to leave a successful band and pursue a solo career.
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