Harry Styles is a master of the middle distance. Look at him turning his right cheek to the camera, strands of wet hair hanging lank, a rogue petal clinging to a clump above his ear: “Sweet Creature is available now. Album is available in ten days. I am available always.” He remains an enigma after spending a half-decade in the world’s most popular boy band and dating one of the world’s biggest pop stars. And yet there’s something about Styles’ combination of roguish charm and eagerness to please that renders him exactly that: available. Leave the right Instagram comment at the right time, and he might show up on your doorstep the next morning with a bag of bagels and coffee with room. The ability to tap into this liminal space between intimacy and detachment is what makes Styles—and Harry Styles, the solo debut he’s releasing about a year and a half after One Direction’s dissolution—so captivating.
If you only know one thing about Harry Styles, it’s probably that the album bucks the established trends governing bids for young male solo pop stardom. Styles is uninterested in walking the trail blazed 15 years ago by Justin Timberlake’s Justified, the one along which young male stars signal their newfound maturity by embracing hip-hop, R&B, and overt libidinousness (c.f. Justin Bieber, Nick Jonas, Zayn Malik). He doesn’t seem to care for the Sheeranesque stadium-folk being churned out by One Direction bandmate Niall Horan, either. Instead, Harry Styles wants to be a rock star—your father’s rock star, or maybe even your grandparents’ rock star. And so this sounds like the work of a musician whose desert island discs include Revolver, Tattoo You, and Vinyl: Music From the HBO Original Series - Vol. 1.
Styles’ debut isn’t subject to the same pressures that defined late-period One Direction, and its songs don’t need to hold up over a year-long stadium tour. It’s still exceedingly easy to hear Styles and his band—spearheaded by jack-of-all-trades executive producer Jeff Bhasker—tip their caps to a wide variety of rock legends and also-rans. “Sweet Creature” catches Styles taking a crack at his very own version of “Blackbird”; the laughable “Woman” opens with a piano flourish out of Prince’s “Do Me, Baby” before settling down into an Elton John strut. Styles’ stabs at hard rock (the one-two punch of “Only Angel” and “Kiwi”) sound like the Rolling Stones and Wolfmother, respectively. And lead single “Sign of the Times” is a skyscraping Bowie ballad that manages to sound like both fun.’s “We Are Young”—one of Bhasker’s biggest hits—and Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” Take issue with Styles’ taste at your leisure, but there’s no denying his comprehensiveness.
His vocal performances are invariably the best parts of these songs. Styles has described his stint in One Direction as “a democracy,” and every song featured a fight for breathing room between four or five hungry young singers. Here, he has space he can use. “Sign of the Times” jumps out of your speakers when he shifts into his thin falsetto, and it climaxes with a series of desperate howls. He makes a convincing alt-country troubadour on “Two Ghosts” and “Ever Since New York” by throwing on a little twang and a healthy helping of world-weariness. The down-home boogie of “Carolina” tests the limits of his nascent swagger. And I’ve never heard someone record their own backing vocals with the enthusiasm and panache Styles brings to Harry Styles. Every hoot, yelp, and chant are delivered with an impish grin, one that makes it hard not to crack a smile of your own.
Going it alone gives Styles the space he needs to soar as a vocalist, but it also throws his shortcomings as a writer into sharp relief. Vague allusions, stock characters, and cliché turns of phrase aside, Styles struggles most with writing about women, a shame given that *Harry Styles *is supposed to be “a song cycle about women and relationships.” The subject of “Only Angel” turns out to be a “devil in between the sheets.” The irrepressible Southern flame at the heart of “Carolina” ends up a “good girl” out of the Drake playbook. “Kiwi” is devoted to a “pretty face on a pretty neck” with a “Holland Tunnel for a nose” (because it’s “always backed up,” he quips). “Two Ghosts” only succeeds because it leans on a handful of references to Styles’ most famous ex, and it’s not even the best Taylor Swift song in his catalogue.
This parade of sexy badasses is amusing but unmemorable, and Styles’ reliance on trite depictions of wild women is disappointing in part because he seems otherwise unbothered by the demands of traditional masculinity. He shrugs off his imagined secret love affairs with other members of One Direction and wins plaudits for the respect he shows his largely female, largely teenage fanbase. Harry Styles might tell you plenty about its namesake’s aesthetic interests and his grown-up turn-ons, but it’s lacking the emotional depth that’s so readily ascribed to him. You finish the album waiting for his pen to catch up with his persona.
There’s one moment in which Harry Styles transcends its big-name influences. Closer “From the Dining Table” opens with a startling scene: a horny, lonely Styles, jerking off in an opulent hotel room before falling back asleep and getting wasted. “I’ve never felt less cool,” he admits. The writing is frank and economic; it sounds like Styles is singing softly into your ear, a bashful mess. It’s the only song on the album that invites you to consider what it must be like to be Harry Styles: unfathomably famous since before you could drive, subjected to unrelenting attention everywhere except bunker-like studios and secluded beaches, forced to zip around and around the world for half a decade when you’re supposed to be figuring out who you are and what you want. And yet “From the Dining Table” sounds less like a complaint than a confession meant for you and you alone. It’s intoxicating, and it ends Harry Styles on the most promising possible note.
