To help kick off your weekend, Harry Styles has just dropped a new single, and coincidentally or not, the theme of “Lights Up” works perfectly for Official Coming Out Day today. In the song’s sultry R&B groove, Styles laments, “All the lights couldn’t put out the dark running through my heart” and asks, “Do you know who you are?” Then the stirring chorus encourages us all to “Shine, step into the light / Shine, so bright sometimes / I’m not every going back.” The song while typically Styles-catchy, is genuinely soulful over any sort of preachiness—so if you’re looking for an anthem for Coming Out Day, it works perfectly, as some on Twitter are pointing out, even calling it a “bi anthem.”
At this writing, the video song is #1 trending on YouTube, with 4,625,776 views since the song came out at midnight. Sure, there are lots of glamour shots of Styles that undoubtedly only boost the video’s popularity, but let’s see if we can try to suss out the theme here: The vertical orgy-like scenes of Styles surrounded by similarly attractive topless men and women seem to be the main thread, intercut with shots of him at what appears to be a hospital/funeral home, then floating in water, and also riding on the back of a motorcycle, only to pull up to the scene of an accident at the end of the (too short! less than three minutes) song. Okay- Styles dies in the car accident, then transcends to the hospital/funeral way station, then is delivered (via water?) to the beautiful and sweaty afterlife, where we will all hedonistically dance with the sexy people. Yep, works for us.
CNN reports that today Styles also blessed us with his first Instagram post since July 2018, and “Lights Up” is “believed to be the first off of Styles’ as-yet-unnamed sophomore album.” If they’re all going to sound like this one, we can hardly wait. Happy Harry Styles’ return day, everybody.