Harry Styles’ new record is an optimistic and humanistic allegory – and it’s his most sonically and lyrically interesting body of work to date.
Harry Styles has been missing from the music scene for nearly four years, and since then, he has done everything from winning Album of the Year at the GRAMMYs for Harry’s House to entering his third decade of life. As he confesses on “American Girls,” turning 30 has come with some emotional turmoil since three of his best friends got married. This motif is scattered all throughout the album, not without a happy ending, though.
The album was produced by the same two main producers as his last 2022 record, Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson. Although the sonic atmosphere is completely different on this record, it still has that signature Harry Styles’ energy all over it, most clearly reflected on the album opener and lead single “Aperture.” Running just over 5 minutes, this single set the stage for the LP’s electronic soundscape, and this extends over to tracks like “Taste Back” and “The Waiting Game,” which don’t sound like anything Styles has ever done before, but it still both sound like a classic Harry Styles song.
The recurring ‘saturn return’ theme continues in “Ready, Steady, Go!” as Styles addresses the unpredictability of dating people who have vastly different lives than him, and the thrill of falling in love with someone before it gets serious. He confronts his own shortcomings on the next track, “Are You Listening Yet?” which use the verses as a sort-of anxious inner monologue, proclaiming “God knows your life is on the brink, and your therapist’s well-fed.”
Another repeating concept are the frequent spirals that Styles faces when wondering how much time in the limelight he has left, as expressed on “Painting By Numbers” where he addresses the “weight of the American children whose hearts [he] break[s].”
However, this is conveyed more implicitly in “Season 2 Weight Loss.” The phenomenon that the title refers to is when actors come back for season two of an extremely successful show, often looking better and thinner, since the success of season one gave them access to plastic surgery, personal trainers, or more recently, GLP-1 medication. The “weight loss” is used as a metaphor for gaining a sense of self outside of what the public eye sees.
As mentioned earlier, Styles reminds the listener that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. “The Waiting Game” sarcastically calls out his own tendency to keep playing ‘the waiting game’ both in relationships, as well as in his professional and personal life. He comes to terms with this fatal flaw and shares the most important thing he learned: stop waiting.
Of course, the title of the record is referred to a multitude of different times. “Dance No More” calls out the weird post-pandemic Gen-Z nature to be closed off and stop dancing with their friends. “DJ’s don’t dance no more” he says, calling back to the end of the fourth track where he jokes, “If you must join a movement, make sure there’s dancing.”
This record is undeniably a step up from any other LP in his discography, and the sonic climaxes are easily found in “Pop” and “Coming Up Roses” which includes an unbelievably transcendent orchestral instrumental break. The final track, named after one of his close friends, “Carla’s Song,” is unequivocally Styles’ magnum opus. Not only is the electro-ambient techno sound perfect for his voice, but the message about discovering the joy and beauty of life is the perfect closer for this album. Styles sings about letting himself feel every single emotion possible and experiencing life from a newer, brighter lens, and on a personal level, this is exactly what I have been waiting four years for.