Harry Styles is ready to invite you inside Harry's House
After months of hype, Styles' third solo studio album is finally here
And so it came to pass: Harry’s House, the third solo studio album from former One Direction star Harry Styles, has arrived on all the places albums go these days—music streaming services, YouTube bootlegs, and, presumably, physical media somewhere on the globe. The album is Styles’ follow-up to 2019's Grammy-winning Fine Line, heralded by Rolling Stone as the 491st best album of all time, which we imagine would be an extremely weird accolade to both contemplate, and accept. (Personally, we couldn’t help but ask ourselves what we could have done to be 490th.)
The release of the 13-track Harry’s House comes a few weeks after the unleashing of its first single, “As It Was,” which has already accrued more than 472 million listens on Spotify alone. (Let’s do a little music math: Even assuming every single one of those streams was done on Spotify’s free ad-supported tier—because those streams count a little less when you’re doing these calculations—the single alone has already scored more than 125,000 album-equivalent units, the industry’s accepted standard for the conversion of streams into album sales. And that’s just Spotify.)
Listening to Harry’s House, it’s definitely of a piece with “As It Was”: Heavy on synths, a little dreamy, and very catchy. We’ll leave it to the Styles scholars (and our own reviewers) to track the themes Styles is tackling here, but it’s certainly a breezy listen on a spring evening.
The release of Harry’s House punctuates a busy period for Styles, who continues to occasionally bulk out his acting career in addition to being one of the most successful musicians on the planet. Most notably, he popped up in one of the ending scenes of Eternals last year, revealing that he’ll be gracing the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thanos’ horny brother Eros, and co-stars in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, out this September. Right now, though, he’s clearly in “massively successful musician” mode; there’s been no mention of a Harry’s House tour, but that’s presumably only because Styles is still in the middle of his last tour; the pandemic-delayed Love On Tour is set to pick back up in Europe next month, and will run through 2023.