Styles’ song is for everyone: an effervescent, high-tempo hit that will have you clicking your heels.
Like Justin Timberlake and Robbie Williams, Harry Styles has mastered one of the most difficult transitions in music – from boyband to solo artist.
With his debut album, he was still figuring out who he was, as if living up to his surname with a variety of anti-Directional genres. Then came 2019’s fine line: focused and alert, even as the hazy musical surroundings changed around him.
Since then, he’s become a post-metrosexual arbiter of contemporary manhood, muscular and tattooed but dressed as a woman, fluid to soften old binaries. However, his style is undeniably an outlier, and it thrills young fans to see this sort of thing for the first time. His music is so well-crafted and instinctive now that his dress-up feels like a part of it.
On the effervescent As It Was, he returns to that sense of freedom, folding traditional modes like feminine prettiness and masculine vigour into something of his own.
The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights, which also has an earworm instrumental motif, is an obvious point of comparison. Styles, like the Weeknd, is a pop artist at the top of their game, riding their own creative waves. That final “hey!” is very similar to The Weeknd’s exclamation at the end of Blinding Lights.
Whereas Blinding Lights was a direct homage to an 80s neon-in-rain aesthetic, As It Was is a richer blend: a real cymbal against an 80s-style melody. The tempo reminded me of the Strokes’ Hard to Explain, and the song is produced by Gen Z stars like Clairo. Possibly the War on Drugs’ signature steady backbeat is another touchstone (as it is for an equally handsome male pop star, Shawn Mendes, with his own new single this week, When You’re Gone), and it also feels Scandinavian, akin to indie-pop artists like Jens Lekman. Styles knows it, as he finishes the video with some Gene Kelly-esque gymnastics.
That clip. Of course, Styles’ innate beauty adds to his pop star appeal and elevates his entire endeavour; watching the video, that sense of freedom is heightened by Styles’ innate beauty, a man who seems to live life on a different track than the rest of us. Maybe it’s just me, but Harry Styles is a joy to watch.
This song’s lyrical style is a step up from pop’s current mode of specific, personal storytelling rather than blustery metaphor (perhaps the biggest songwriting legacy of brief Styles squeeze Taylor Swift, and a style done so well by Olivia Rodrigo, Adele and the 1975 in recent years). “Harry, you’re no good alone / Why are you sitting at home on the floor?” a friend says over the phone. It’s clear that “Leave America, two kids follow her” is referring to his girlfriend, Olivia Wilde, a mother of two. This is backed up by the video, which shows Styles trapped on a treadmill with his partner, then freed for some joyful jumps around the Barbican. Is his relationship shaky?
That wondrous, even frightening moment in love when you realise your life is forever changed. His alternatingly dejected and upbeat delivery also leaves you in suspense.
Some say Styles’ genius is in obscuring the meaning just enough so everyone talks about it like this; others say he writes so anyone can see themselves in his songs. In any case, As It Was is a masterpiece.