Harry Styles is back.
The English pop phenomenon and ex-idol of millions of teenagers released his third album on Friday.
A thousand leagues from the rowdy hymns of the time of his former boy band
One Direction
, the British singer and actor is now completing a long transformation.
The teenage star of the 2010s gave way to the inspired artist, author of soft compositions, between electronic and acoustic music.
To discover
Discover the “Best of the Goncourt Prize” collection
Read alsoDeath of Vangelis, Greek composer of the
Chariots of Fire
and
Blade Runner soundtrack
With suave and tender accents, his latest album,
Harry's House
, reveals a 28-year-old man, in love and full of desires.
While having known how to remain shy and modest.
The 13-track disc evokes the atmosphere of a bright Californian summer afternoon spent by the pool, and strongly conveys Styles' most perfected songwriting skills.
Until making his fans blush.
"I feel like it's kind of a cross-section of everything I like best and it's very close to the album that I've always wanted to do, I'm really happy about it
, "
Harry Styles launched after performing on NBC's "Today" morning show at Rockefeller Plaza in New York on Thursday.
"It's definitely the most personal record I think I've made,"
he said of a production influenced by
"the pandemic and everything that's happened
," especially in New York. , bruised and deserted in the spring of 2020.
Harry's House
is
"the most free-spirited music I have ever produced"
, concluded the artist, who had won a Grammy in March 2021 for the best pop solo performance.
Read alsoAntivax Eric Clapton, positive for Covid-19, cancels several dates of his tour
A dazzling solo career
Harry Styles, born on February 1, 1994 near Birmingham, England, rose to fame early on in
One Direction,
with his bandmates Niall Horan, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson.
The boy band, active from 2010 to 2016, remains one of the teenage bands that have sold the most records in the world.
After the separation of the group, Styles released a first solo album in 2017. Propelled to the top of the charts, the singer continued in 2019 with
Fine Line
, his second album.
An equally resounding commercial success.
Today, Harry Styles gives himself the air of a young crooner, despite his open opposition to any virilism.
One of his new songs,
Boyfriends
, presents him, on the contrary, as an ally of broken hearts, a charismatic, accessible and inclusive antithesis to the
toxic and masculinist
"boyfriend" .
But his lyrics go far beyond a bleeding romantic heart.
Harry Styles has an appetite.
After
Watermelon Sugar,
a thinly veiled ode to cunnilingus released with his second album,
Harry's House
returns to eroticism.
Always hidden, it seems, between two food metaphors.
Read alsoBillie Eilish, The Empress, Stromae… The best moments of the first weekend of Coachella
The veiled but daring lyrics of the album's first title,
Music for a Sushi Restaurant
, would thus translate the artist's desire to reveal his desires.
But for whom?
The tabloids have been speculating about a romance with American actress and director Olivia Wilde, 38, especially since she cast him in her upcoming psychological thriller
Don't Worry Darling
.
Feeding this track, the title
Cinema
, in the middle of the album, is a ballad with a sexual connotation which seems to refer to his relationship with the filmmaker.
Despite very suggestive texts, Harry Styles nevertheless very conscientiously protects his privacy.
Asked for a long time about his sexuality and his love life, the singer recently felt that these questions had now become “
obsolete
”.
"What matters in the direction we are taking - accepting everyone and being more open - is that precisely that does not matter"
, he judged in the magazine
Better Homes and Gardens
, refusing to
" put labels on everything and tick all the boxes
.