Late March saw a flurry of announcements to do with Harry Styles’ Harry’s House. ‘You Are Home’ is the ‘Eroda’ of the Adore You singer’s third studio album it seems, the pre-announcement marketing involving mysterious social media accounts and newspaper advertisements quickly sniffed out by online sleuths. The hints increased as a Twitter account of cryptic lyrics, Instagram posts of doors left ajar, even a Discord server with channels named for household items and rooms in a house. In contrast to the vibrancy of Styles’ Fine Line era, Harry’s House is more muted in tone, with colourful pops that stand out from a warm neutral background. 

Written in collaboration with Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, the album’s first single ‘As It Was’ is a short one at under 3 minutes. A child’s voice, Styles’ goddaughter, says ‘come on Harry, we wanna say goodnight to you!’ We are then thrown into a frantic beat reminiscent of a-ha’s ‘Take on Me,’ in juxtaposition with murmured, melancholic lyrics. The song is bookended by a bell riff that, at its end, overpowers the previously dominant drums and synths. The tune feels victorious, but is tempered by the lyric ‘Ringing the bell / Nobody’s coming to help.’ This contrast lasts through the song – ‘As It Was’ is not only sonically catchy and danceable, the imagery of the video is rich with symbolism. 

Styles is first seen through a ridged glass door, wearing a red coat, black boa (as has become somewhat of a signature) and black gloves. Amidst a crowd of neutral-wearers striding forwards, he is pulled backwards by an invisible force through the brutalist halls of the Barbican, singing ‘gravity’s holding me back.’ As he passes through the threshold, his coat and accessories are shed to reveal a red sequinned jumpsuit (designed by Arturo Obegero) as he enters a large rectangular room, bare but for a treadmill/turntable centrepiece and blue-clad female counterpart. 

Styles is fond of this trope in his music videos. A girl played a younger version of himself in ‘Kiwi’ and Phoebe Waller-Bridge completed his double act in ‘Treat People With Kindness.’ ‘As It Was’ again sees Styles with one such complementary character, who wears an identical jumpsuit, in blue rather than his red, and performs many of the same movements, albeit as a mirror. Red and blue are commonly used to create 3D effects which initially appear distorted, while simply requiring an additional lens to see the intended image. The two primary colours hold many other complementary meanings– warm and cool, passion and peace, masculine and feminine, knowledge and blissful ignorance (per The Matrix). Choreographer Yoann Bourgeois modelled the revolving stage after his piece ‘Celui Dui Tombe’ that explores the physicality of survival. In ‘As It Was,’ red reaches for blue but misses or lets go, compelled by internal struggle and external force.

‘You know it’s not the same’ – the camera flips in the second verse to where he, she and the earlier crowd strip off their clothes together, him down to his underwear (also red). ‘In this world,’ they are allowed to embrace the way the intertwining spirals of the Penguin Pool at the London Zoo are. The set shifts now to reference Charles and Ray Eames’ ‘pinned’ by chair bases as the neutral-wearers (now stripped down) trap him and her with chairs. They are forced apart like colourful tectonic plates to reveal monochrome rift valleys in a reflection of Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam.’ 

‘You know it’s not the same as it was’ is repeated like a mantra until it shifts in the bridge to ‘I don’t want to talk about the way that it was.’ At this point he and she are running on the treadmill, eyes red-rimmed with exertion and sadness, neither catching up to the other. She disappears abruptly then, but perhaps ‘she lives in daydreams with me’ still. The mood shifts entirely in time with the bell solo. He smiles for the first time in the video, dances joyously around the room, emerges liberated to the Barbican’s courtyard and finally through its gate.

The video invites any meaning you may glean from it. Ukrainian Grammy-nominated director Tanu Muino shot ‘As It Was’ as her country fell into crisis, and remarked on the project as a ‘bucket list dream come true.’ Styles’ acting chops speak favourably of his starring roles in movies ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ and ‘My Policeman,’ both in post-production. 

Styles’ said in his interview for Heart UK that his ‘[working] out who [he] was away from music… allowed [him] to make this album from a more liberated place,’ explaining the song to Audacy as portraying ‘metamorphosis, embracing change and former self, perspective shift.’ With Styles’ liking of ambiguity and symbolism, the curiously named Harry’s House may well be another name for ‘mind palace,’ a stand-in for an artistic exploration of memory and identity grounded in a place that only exists in one’s imagination. ‘As It Was’ calls back to his previous work and sets up a whole new world for the Harry Styles Extended Universe. Already breaking records, whatever comes next is sure to be an earworm, if not a work of art in its own right. 

Harry’s House is set to release on 20th May 2022, ahead of the UK and European leg of Styles’ second headlining tour. 

Rating: 9/10

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