With 2019’s Fine Line, Harry Styles seemed to attempt to reinvent himself as a Bowie-esque shapeshifter whose public persona and style was as chameleonic as that of the thin white duke. But where that album dabbled in the sounds and aesthetics of 1970s folk and pop, the singer’s follow-up, Harry’s House, moves into the ’80s, drawing on new wave and synth-pop and blanketing the album with a more polished sheen.
The sounds of synth-pop are most prominent on tracks like “Daydreaming” and “Satellite,” whose bright synth tones are used largely as flourishes. Though it’s nice to hear Styles branching out and embracing more contemporary sounds, these elements often feel underdeveloped, as if they were just slapped together during the mixing stage. Beyond that, though, these songs are rather forgettable, and not of the same caliber as “Adore You” or even this album’s lead single, “As It Was.” The latter is breezy, fun, and infectious, with the synth elements downplayed so as not to distract too much from the quality of the songwriting.
The other stylistic mode that Styles employs on Harry’s House is slow and mostly acoustic. Tracks like “Boyfriends” and “Love of My Life” feature sparse instrumentation, usually acoustic guitar or piano, while Styles’s vocal performance is restrained. Many of these tracks evince a sense of quiet introversion that suits Styles’s voice well, particularly on a cut like “Little Freak” where the passionate highs of the chorus lend pathos to the lyrical focus on loneliness.
On “Matilda,” Styles assures a victim of neglect and abuse that “you don’t have to go home.” Though the chorus, which suggests that she throw a party but not invite her family, feels like a glib solution to serious trauma, embracing the love in one’s life is a worthwhile sentiment. Other tracks are simply nonstarters due to baffling production choices. The opening track, “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” is a perfectly fine slice of funk-inflected pop, but its aggressive horn blasts serve little purpose within the context of the song.
The album both sees Styles cementing his status as music’s premier sensitive, shy guy and growing comfortable enough within the pop idiom that he inhabits to push against it—but only ever so slightly. Styles may be a fashion trendsetter, but with Harry’s House, he continues trying on different styles in an effort to discover his own.
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