Harry Styles

Harry Styles

Essential Albums

  • Harry's House
    Harry's House
    Harry's House

    Harry Styles’ third solo album, Harry’s House, is the product of a chain reaction. Had the pandemic not thrown his world into a tailspin in early 2020, he would’ve continued to tour behind Fine Line, his critically adored sophomore album, and played its songs hundreds of times for sold-out crowds around the world. A return to the studio was planned, of course, but when COVID-19 cancelled those plans too, Styles faced an empty calendar for the first time in a decade. The singer opted to use this free time carefully, taking a solo road trip through Italy and visiting with family and friends for rare long, drawn-out stretches. It was an important moment of re-evaluation. “You miss so many birthdays,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And eventually it's just assumed you're unable to be at stuff. Finally I was like, ‘I want to balance my life out a bit. Working isn’t who I am, it's something I do. I want to be able to put that down.’” His upbeat, lightly electronic third LP riffs on the concept of home, viewing it less as a geographical location and more as a state of mind—his mind. “Imagine it’s a day in my house, a day in my mind,” he said. “What do I go through? I’m playing fun music. I’m playing sad music. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff.” Because of the pandemic, Styles recorded the songs with a small handful of long-time friends and close collaborators who gathered in a single room to drink wine, write and play. That intimacy is reflected in the songs, which are conversational and casually confessional, as if he’s thinking out loud. Blending vintage folk rock with flickers of disco and a generally more relaxed sensibility, they illustrate a turning point in Styles’ career as he transitions even further towards career singer-songwriter. “For a while it was, how do I play that game of remaining exciting?” he says. “But I finally had a moment where I felt like, ‘Okay, I’m not the young thing, so I would like to really think about who I want to be as a musician.’” Read on for the inside story behind a handful of standout selections from Harry’s House. “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” “After Fine Line, I had an idea of how I thought the next album would open. But there's something about ‘Sushi’ that felt like, ‘Nah, that's how I want to start.’ It becomes really obvious what the first song should be based on what you play for people when they’re like, ‘Oh, can I hear a bit of the music?’ It's like, how do you want to set the tone?” “Daylight” “We were like, ‘We have to find a way to stay awake and finish this, because if we all go to bed, then this won’t turn out the way it would if we finished tonight.’ So we powered through, finished it and went down to the beach as the sun was coming up and it was like, ‘Okay. Yeah.’ It felt correct that we'd finished it in that place. Life, and songs in particular, are so much about moments. In surfing, for example, sometimes you don't get the wave and sometimes the wave comes and you haven't practised. But every now and again, the wave comes and you’re ready, you've practised enough that you can ride it. Sometimes when the songs write themselves like that, it feels like, ‘Okay, there's a reason why sometimes I sit out there, falling off the board a bunch. It's for this moment.” “As It Was” “‘As It Was’, to me, is bittersweet. It’s devastating. It's a death march. It’s about metamorphosis and a perspective change, which are not necessarily things you have time with. People aren’t like, ‘Oh, we'll give you a couple more days with this moment and let you say goodbye to your former self,’ or whatever. No. Everyone is changing, and by the time you realise what’s happened, [the moment] is already gone. During the pandemic, I think we all at some point realised that it would never be the same as it was before. It was so obvious that it wouldn’t. You can't go backwards—we can’t as a society and I can’t in my personal life. But you learn so much in those moments because you’re forced to face things head-on, whether they’re your least favourite things about the world or your least favourite things about yourself, or all of it.” “Matilda” “I had an experience with someone where, in getting to know them better, they revealed some stuff to me that was very much like, ‘Oh, that's not normal, like I think you should maybe get some help or something.’ This song was inspired by that experience and person, who I kind of disguised as Matilda from the Roald Dahl book. I played it to a couple of friends and all of them cried. So I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is something to pay attention to.’ It's a weird one, because with something like this, it's like, ‘I want to give you something, I want to support you in some way, but it's not necessarily my place to make it about me because it's not my experience.’ Sometimes it's just about listening. I hope that's what I did here. If nothing else, it just says, ‘I was listening to you.’” “Boyfriends” “‘Boyfriends’ was written right at the end of Fine Line. I'd finished the album and there was an extra week where I wrote ‘Adore You’, ‘Lights Up’ and ‘Treat People With Kindness’. At the end of the session for ‘Lights Up’, we started writing ‘Boyfriends’ and it felt like, ‘Okay, there's a version of this story where we get this song ready for this album.’ But something about it just felt like, no, it’ll have its time, let's not rush it. We did so many versions of it. Vocal. Acoustic. Electric guitar. Harmonies on everything, and then we took them out for chunks and put them back in for chunks. You try not to get ahead of yourself when you write a song, but there was something about this one where I felt like, ‘Okay, when I'm 50, if I'm playing a show, maybe there's someone who heard me for the first time when they were 15 and this is probably the song they came to see.’ Because I'm learning so much by singing it. It’s my way of saying, ‘I’m hearing you.’ It’s both acknowledging my own behaviour and looking at behaviour I've witnessed. I grew up with a sister, so I watched her date people, and I watched friends date people, and people don't treat each other very nicely sometimes.” “Cinema” “I think I just wanted to make something that felt really fun, honestly. I was on a treadmill going, ‘Do-do-do-do-do-do.’ I tend to do so much writing in the studio, but with this one, I did a little bit here and then I went home and added a little bit there, and then kind of left it, and then went into the studio to put it all together. That was a theme across the whole album, actually: We used to book a studio and be like, ‘Okay, we've got it for two months, grind it out.’ But some days you just don't want to be there, and eventually you've been in the studio so long, the only thing you can write about is nothing because you haven't done anything. So with this album, we’d work for a couple of weeks and then everyone would go off and live their lives.” “Love of My Life” “‘Love of My Life’ was the most terrifying song because it's so bare. It's so sparse. It’s also very much in the spirit of what Harry's House is about: I wanted to make an acoustic EP, all in my house, and make it really intimate. It’s named after [the Japanese pop pioneer Haruomi] Hosono, who had an album in the '70s called Hosono House. I immediately started thinking about what Harry’s House might look like. It took time for me to realise that the house wasn't a geographical location, it was an internal thing. When I applied that concept to the songs we were making here, everything took on new meaning. Imagine it's a day in my house or a day in my mind. What do I go through? I'm playing fun music. I'm playing sad music. I'm playing this, I'm playing that. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff. And it’s all mine. This is my favourite album at the moment. I love it so much. And because of the circumstances, it was made very intimately; everything was played by a small number of people and made in a room. To me, it's everything. It's everything I've wanted to make.”

  • Fine Line
    Fine Line
    Fine Line

    “When I listen to the first album now, I can hear all of the places where I was playing it safe,” Harry Styles tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. "I went into the second one feeling like, ‘I want to work out how to make all of this really fun.’” With his self-titled debut solo album—a collision of ’70s rock, swampy alt-country and world-weary, introspective balladry—the British singer-songwriter transitioned from boy-band idol to bona fide rock star. The songs, all variations on an emotional theme, explored the peculiar reality of being young, vulnerable and unfathomably famous—a lonely combination when you're still figuring yourself out. In the two years since, Styles has made strides on this last front: He got his heart broken, holed up in Malibu and Japan, expanded his mind, wrote songs and joined his generation in questioning whether constructs like gender and sexuality help us understand who we are. Identity—more specifically, self-discovery—is at the core of his sophomore album Fine Line, as evident on the lead single “Lights Up” (“Know who you are/Do you know who you are?”) and “Falling” (“What am I now?/What if I’m someone I don’t want around?"). As in life, these explorations take many forms: There are whistling highway reveries (“Canyon Moon”), indie folk songs ("Sunflower, Vol. 6") and even tortured pleas (“Do you think it’s easy being of the jealous kind?” he asks on "To Be So Lonely"). Unlike his last album, Fine Line practically explodes in colour. High-pitched harmonies, buoyant string arrangements and gently psychedelic melodies evoke an almost dreamlike abandon, and once in a while he goes for broke. The wide-eyed, philosophical elation of “Treat People With Kindness”—a flurry of retro guitar and gospel sparkle—peaks when Styles lets out a howl, drags his hand across the piano keys and signals a conga break. As a storyteller, Styles is full of hope and devoid of pretense: He wants you, he feels good in his skin, he’s going to dance, it’s going to be all right. “Coming into this record, I wanted to feel less guarded and more joyful, free and honest,” he says. To encourage creativity and brave songwriting, he waited until the songs were finished to determine whether he’d revealed too much (and then he added more, like dialogue from an ex on “Cherry”). “Really,” he says, "I never want to trim that stuff down.” Below, he shares the stories behind three of his favourites. Golden "My favourite memory from making this album was the day we wrote ‘Golden'. We were all sat in the kitchen at [Rick Rubin’s recording studio] Shangri-La, having dinner, and we played it on one guitar while everyone sang around the table. It just felt really good. Part of the thing with the mushrooms for me is that I never do anything when I'm working. I don't even drink when I'm working. I don't drink really at all. And when I was in the band, to me it felt like it was so much bigger than any of us. I felt like, I’m not going to be the one who messes it up. So I thought, now is the time in my life when you go out and experiment. You take this and you do that. Making this record just felt…joyous. I was with my friends and we were in Malibu and I felt so safe. Now's the time to have fun—we're 24, and I'm in music. I’m not a politician. We wrote it on day two of being at Shangri-La, and immediately, as soon as we'd done it, it was like, 'Oh, this is track one.’ I used to drive to the studio, and it’s the perfect PCH song. It’s like driving down the coast is what the song is for.” Cherry "I wanted to be true to [the breakup]. I wanted it to be true to how I was feeling then, in that moment. It was all part of being more open and not like, 'I don't care.' You get petty when something's not going the way that you want, and ‘Cherry' is pathetic in a way. The night that I wrote it, I was feeling a lot of pressure because the last record wasn't a radio record. I felt a lot of pressure to be making these big songs. And my friend said to me, 'You just have to make the record that you want to make right now—that's it.' So we stayed up and wrote 'Cherry' that night.” Falling “One thing I hadn’t experienced before was how I felt during the making of this record. The times when I felt good and happy were the happiest I've ever felt in my life, and the times when I felt sad were the lowest I’ve ever felt in my life. ‘Falling' was about falling back into one of those low moments. The chorus says, 'What am I now? Am I someone I don't want around?' I had started to feel myself becoming someone I didn't want to be, and that was really hard. But the nice thing is you get to write a song about it and be like, ‘Okay, next.’ The night I wrote it, I was going out for dinner and getting picked up by a friend. When I came out of the shower, he was playing the piano and singing, so I went and stood next to him, in a towel, and we wrote the whole thing in maybe 20 minutes. He's like, 'Okay, we finished it. Please go put some trousers on.’”

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About Harry Styles

Not everyone gets famous as a teenager—and even fewer escape the experience intact. So congratulations to Harry Styles, who would’ve been fine had he retired after One Direction but instead went on to become one of the more interesting and adventurous pop stars of his era. “I think there’s a lot of things that used to feel like, Okay, there’s a part of your life, then there’s a hard stop, then there’s a next part of your life,” he told Apple Music around the release of 2022’s Grammy-winning Harry’s House. “Things that used to feel so unbelievably foreign to me, sort of terrifying—like, I’m not 19 anymore, so I’m less terrified. And realising [life’s] just one thing, and not chapter over, bye-bye.” Perspective: It helps, whether you’re out there in front of 50,000 people or performing the very first Apple Music Live session. Part of what made One Direction great was that they never shied away from the pleasures of boy-band pop but never patronised their audiences, either: Never mind the no-dancing policy; they wrote their own songs and cultivated their own musical perspectives. Beyond his precision-tooled indie-curious pastiche of classic pop, soft-rock, psychedelia and soul, Styles’ lyrics capture a playfulness and emotional specificity that feels unusual for pop so big, whether it’s the flirtation of “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” (“Green eyes/Fried rice/I could cook an egg on you”) or the image of a kid outrunning an unhappy home on “Matilda” (“You were riding your bike to the sound of ‘It’s No Big Deal’”). That life he’s pontificating about? Listen to the music and you can almost hear him living it.

HOMETOWN
Redditch, England
BORN
1 February 1994
GENRE
Pop

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