Harry Styles - Fine Line

The Guardian 80

(Columbia)

Harry Styles’ fanbase haven’t, like most, named themselves in his image, and it’s telling: his admirers sometimes seem like the least important part of the package. He’s a blurry focal point, avoiding specific personal or political pronouncements. By vaguely standing for fluidity and tolerance, he creates a space for fantasy that perhaps he has realised is best left undisturbed. But to some, Styles’s aesthetic – whether the 70s California stylings of his self-titled debut or his conspicuously flamboyant attire – looked like window dressing on a blank shopfront.

Fine Line rectifies that by putting Styles’s identity, at least in one domain, front and centre as he grapples with a breakup. Is he the heartbreaker or heartbroken? Is he, on To Be So Lonely, the victim or “arrogant son of a bitch who can’t admit when he’s sorry”? The line, “no one to blame but the drink and my wandering hands”, from Falling, has prompted tabloid headlines.

Pitchfork 60

Harry Styles hides himself inside of a mystic pop-rock record that keeps us away from who he is as a songwriter and fledgling rock star.

The Guardian 60

(Erskine/Columbia)

Back in 2017, Harry Styles’s self-titled debut solo album attempted to rebrand his image from teen heart-throb to 1970s rock star, although many would argue he still leans heavily towards the former. With the release of his follow-up Fine Line, his idols – Bowie, Queen, Pink Floyd – are less to the fore as Styles begins to find his own niche.

He still sings the blues on breakup ballad Cherry, and gives us a taste of old school rock’n’roll on the jolly Canyon Moon and Treat People With Kindness. But the album’s most endearing moments are when he experiments. Sunflower, Vol 6 – perhaps the result of one of the magic mushroom trips he told Rolling Stone about – sounds like it was bathed in southern California sunshine. “Let me inside, I wanna get to know you,” he coos over a breezy ska rhythm.