Knock Knock

There’s something both vacant and inviting about Harry’s House.

- CRAIG JENKINS

THE LAST TIME Harry Styles released an album, his late-2019 sophomore effort, Fine Line, nothing went according to plan. covid-19’s first wave forced the British singer-songwriter and erstwhile One Direction member into an unplanned break in the States. Styles wisely postponed a spring 2020 tour, and that March, for the first time in a long while, the singer found himself taking inventory of relationships he’d neglected during his six-year tenure in the boy band and the subsequent simultaneous launch of his solo-music and acting careers.

Escaping and exploring exhaustion has been a theme of the pandemic era; new works from Lorde, Taylor Swift, and Kendrick Lamar have each expressed it to varying degrees. Harry’s House, the third Styles album, follows suit. It is your quintessential spring release, a batch of bubbly, funk-inflected jams celebrating the bodily and emotional pleasures that new romance entails. Five years on his own, the pop star has settled into a precarious public life, sharing certain things while leaving the rest up for interpretation. He has left the door open to the idea that he’s sexually fluid while modeling gender-fluid fashions at concerts and in magazine profiles; he’s also making cishet bros jealous while jet setting with director-actor Olivia Wilde. Harry’s House offers a peek at the couple’s unique version of domesticity but doesn’t let us poke around past the foyer.