Harry Styles by Harry Styles is available now, and for many fans it’s a dream come true. We want your help to rank the songs on the most anticipated record of the year.
Taking what seems like both forever and no time at all, the debut solo album from One Direction’s Harry Styles has arrived. The rock-influenced, emphatically melodic ten-track offering is now available wherever you get your music fix — Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, your local record store, or Styles’s website. This project, rather unexpectedly announced in late March, was written and recorded at a remote home studio in Jamaica, while Styles spent time out of the public eye in order to discover what he wanted to do with his voice and vision.
Styles released his first single, the epic piano ballad “Sign of the Times,” on April 7 during an extensive interview with close friend Nick Grimshaw on BBC’s Radio 1. The details of his full-length album quickly followed.
In the lead-up to today’s release, Styles made his U.S. performance debut as a solo artist on Saturday Night Live, sharing “Sign of the Times” and “Ever Since New York,” his U.K. debut on The Graham Norton Show, and he’s covered Rolling Stone Magazine with an incendiary profile written by rock journalism-turned-screenwriting legend Cameron Crowe.
He’s sold out an intimate, theatre-venue-based world tour in minutes, gifted his fans with the release of another song, the jangling and sentimental “Sweet Creature,” and soared through the skies in the rather bizarre music video for “Sign of the Times.” He’s attempted to stage dive at a tiny secret show at Brooklyn’s Rough Trade, and delighted massive crowds at The Today Show, rocking “Stockholm Syndrome” – a 1D track that he has the lead writing credit on – while wearing a shocking pink suit. (“Pink,” Styles told Crowe, quoting The Clash’s Paul Simonon, “is the only true rock & roll colour,” and indeed, the record itself, which features vulnerable photos of Styles immersed in pink water, was nearly called Pink. Even before this official revelation, fans had dubbed it “The Pink Album,” akin to The Beatles’ self-titled.)
Next week, he’ll head to Los Angeles to take part in a week-long residency on The Late Late Show, hosted by another close friend, James Cordon. Today, as fans can finally hear the album in its entirety, Styles visited Grimshaw at the BBC once again to talk about the meaning of some of the tracks. But what kind of impression are they making on you?
We’ll revisit the subject of Harry Styles by Harry Styles once we’ve listened to it a few dozen times, but until that – from hallways to dining tables, which song is immediately standing out as your favorite?
Thanks for voting! Now you can get back to studying the nuances of Harry Styles by Harry Styles – and yes, “Two Ghosts,” the only track that dates back further than the Jamaica sessions, very probably is about That Ex.
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