Harry Styles - Harry Styles

Pitchfork 68

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.

The Guardian 60

This post-One Direction debut is a melange of musical homages that fails to reach the heights of Styles’ idols. But one thing it isn’t is dull

Whatever else you may have made of them, you could never accuse One Direction of not following the script. Over the course of their career, they did everything boybands are supposed to do – sell millions of records, tire of being objects of pre-pubescent desire, ride out tabloid scandal when blurry photos appear of one or more members smoking a joint, insist they will continue when a loose cannon member announces his departure, then split up a year later. Now, the band’s former members find themselves doing the things former members of boybands always do: releasing pop R&B with arty inclinations, dabbling in dance music, or attempting to reinvent themselves as earnest acoustic singer-songwriters.

Harry Styles may have chosen the trickiest path of all. His debut album, Harry Styles, ticks every box on the Take Me Seriously checklist. Team of triple-tested songwriting help assembled, including platinum-plated hitmaker and former alt-rock artist? Tick: the credits include Uptown Funk co-author Jeff Bhasker and one-time indie singer-songwriter turned Florence + the Machine collaborator Tom “Kid Harpoon” Hull. Longest and ostensibly least commercial track released as debut single-cum-warning shot? Tick: the doleful six-minute-long ballad Sign of the Times. Songs that knowingly reference classic rock, including early-70s Elton John (Woman), the Beatles’ Blackbird (Sweet), U2 circa The Joshua Tree (Ever Since New York) and the Rolling Stones circa Sticky Fingers (Only Angel)? Tick. Slightly self-conscious stabs at sonic experimentation? Tick, not least a rhythm track punctuated by what sounds like one of those tin toys that moos like a cow when you turn it over being repeatedly inverted. Lyrics that attempt to address topics more grownup than dancing all night to the best song ever? Tick, up to and including the closing From the Dining Table, a bit of fingerpicked folk that opens with the diverting image of Harry Styles assuaging his loneliness by – and in the forthright spirit of the song itself, let us not mince words – having a wank.

Related: Harry Styles debuts Sign of the Times. Is he really the new Bowie?

Related: Harry Styles believes that children are the future

The Guardian 60

MOR tunes feature heavily on the One Direction man’s first solo venture, but there are some surprises lurking…

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.

Drowned In Sound 30

There's been talk about whether or not he is suitable for ‘grown-up’ ears, while other notable writers have invoked David Bowie, or prostrated wildly – such as in the Rolling Stone profile penned by Almost Famous director Cameron Crowe; a piece which worked overtime in the ‘gushing’ department.

The latter press clipping is where you find Styles taking the time to hail teenage girls for having more music taste credibility than they are traditionally recognised for. It’s a sincere gesture from a smart young man who knows his audience and appreciates the opportunity to tune into their frequency, but will they tune into his? If he’s on the money about that particular demographic being into the classics, then he may consider the mission accomplished, as Harry Styles the album is highly concerned with people and stylistic techniques that have made a mark long before him.

From start to finish, Harry Styles is a series of impressions. One minute he’s Elton John, then he’s Beck, then he’s Mick Jagger, then he’s The Beatles—and then he’s every milquetoast singer/songwriter blanding up the local boozer on an equally nondescript evening. There isn’t a single trace of Harry Styles the person on these ten songs. None of them belong to him, nor is there a tangible feeling that he’s greatly enjoying what he’s doing.

‘They’re our future’, noted Styles in his aforementioned shout-out to young women. In the fickle, immediate world of pop music, they represent our shining present as the vast majority of male solo acts continue to paint the town grey with a homogenous, tame sound that strangles the opportunity for individual expression. It’s kind of incredible that a project with this level of investment and a seemingly driven character behind it could result in such a void. There’s something especially eerie about listening to music and feeling absolutely nothing, to the point that it becomes inherently depressing if you focus on it for too long.

The highlight, that is to say the only real moment of hope, is both instant and fleeting. ‘Meet Me in the Hallway’ unfurls with agreeable haze thanks to lacquered bass-notes and serpentine guitar that Styles is eager to shout over - raising his pitch much too quickly and embarking down an unwieldy vocal path that eventually buries the simple arrangement with it. Strike one where there was no real need for it, and it only continues from there.

Vaunted lead single ‘Sign of the Times’ fails to connect any better in context; it’s still a laboured lift of ‘Angels’, with a surreal use of slide guitar, clunky lyrics, and a grandiosity that registers as misjudged self-indulgence. Speaking of flying too close to the sun, the irritating ‘Sweet Creature’ represents the latest futile attempt at a ‘Blackbird’ reworking while more jaunty fare like ‘Carolina’ and ‘Only Angel’ haven’t a prayer when one is a cheap ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’ pastiche and the other drops clangers like ”it turns out she’s a devil between the sheets” without a hint of irony. Pumped-up guitar stomp ‘Kiwi’, meanwhile, sounds like an unholy union between Scouting For Girls and Jet.

In trying to be all things to all fans, all critics, all expectations, all click-bait corners, Harry Styles has failed to make a defining statement. His first shot in anger is an expensive stab at empty imitation. There’s also a troubling sense of a marketing team burning the midnight oil as their top priority is made palatable for every potential audience; think the Harry Potter books with their ‘adult-friendly’ cover facelift. Like the precocious wizard, his name alone is enough to generate huge amounts of money in a matter of seconds, so don’t worry, he’ll be fine. For now, however, there is no cause to celebrate such aggressive mediocrity.