You won’t find paranoia or insecurity here. Nor for that matter,the self-basting obsessiveness of someone who is permanently attended and never refused. Like his easy way with wide pants and loose curls,Styles isn’t pretending that life isVogue-spread perfect,but nor is he acting as if being rich,beautiful,feted and connected is a curse.
In Harry’s house there are people everywhere,doing and talking and living,some of them the host,many of them guests. They are making breakfast in the kitchen and doing lines in the bathroom,drinking an ’82 red and sitting on the floor being told,“Harry you’re no good on your own/Why are you sitting on the floor?/What kind of pills are you on?”
Maybe at home,maybe on the road,there are those who are on the “come down speed” and those who will “share the last line/Then we drink the wall/Until we wanna talk”. And while some are sleeping off a night,hoping to forget the ill-timed proposition or the romantic failures which ended early so “you never saw my birthmark”,others are thinking about sex and food-for-sex metaphors,from popcorn to grape juice (which may well be the newWatermelon Sugar).
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Still,it doesn’t pay to go too much further with a lyrical analysis of Harry Styles. If three albums and a Coachella turn have told us anything it is that while his musical maturity quickly accelerated and his live performance is a work in progress,words in the main are closer to functional than thought-through. That said,there is an intriguing couplet inLove of My Life that keeps alive the promise of better from him:“I’ve been doing everything I can to get to know your creases and your ends/Are they the same?”
But the open attitude and zest for experience here,the joy in being Harry Styles,that defines his lyrics,his fashion – dare we say it,his persona – is reflected or amplified in the music,written in the main with Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson,and the decade from which it draws.
This is an album of freewheeling effortlessness,of sensuality and confidence,of pop and R&B. The default setting is the 1980s,that decade of brighter lights and bigger shoulders serving the newly discovered “aspirationals”,mostly leaving behind the part hopeful/part cynical 1970s styling of his previous album,Fine Line,for something bolder and more brash.