You're a person reading a music site, so you probably know Harry Styles released his first solo song today. He "teased" it last Friday 31 March – also the 30th anniversary of Prince's Sign o' the Times, *upside-down smiling emoji* – and since then, there have been various whispers about the song's sound (the common denominator has tended to be "Queen"). To round off the buildup, some powerful images surfaced of Harry hanging out of a helicopter, and of his stunt double wearing a mask of his face during a music video shoot, to whet our collective appetite. Never ones to keep our gobs shut, now that "Sign of the Times" is out after debuting on Grimmy's Radio 1 breakfast show, we've got things to say. So please, without further ado, enjoy this Harry Styles-themed roundtable featuring Noisey's own Daisy Jones, Tshepo Mokoena, Lauren O'Neill, Ryan Bassil and Emma Garland.
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OK, First: General Feelings on Harry Styles
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Tshepo: The last boyband I cared about was probably N*Sync so I have very few feelings about Harry Styles. I think his voice is good – though he reminds me of the people at music school who'd put on a husky texture because that was the "in" sound – but there's not much else there. I am 28 years old, though.Ryan: Look, I love Justin Timberlake. I would consider shaving my head in an attempt to bring "SexyBack". That's how inspiring the man is. Harry Styles hasn't even bothered going to the barbers for this comeback – this is already more words than he deserves. What sort of pop star is he?!Lauren: It's very Baby's First Bowie isn't it? "Sign of the Times" sounds like "Life on Mars" filtered through a machine that makes everything sound 30 percent more "Chris Martin woz ere." The sound, for me, is disappointing because despite my more sensible instincts, I had naively pinned all my hopes on an exact replica of One Direction's sadly under-appreciated Springsteen-lite bangeranger "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" and spent quite a long time imagining him performing it as a surprise guest at Glastonbury, wearing one of his lovely bandanas and a cut off T-shirt showing off his lovely arms. Instead, we got Ed Sheeran's uni halls mate who's well into T-Rex because he heard "Children of the Revolution" on a bread advert.Tshepo: This sounds exactly like how I thought a debut Harry "splash!" track would. As an early adopter of the deep-V shirt, skinnies and those pointy boots you only ever see on guys who probably still like Kasabian, Harry's aesthetic has been priming him for a "classic rock meets glam" single like this. And yes, you can obviously hear the Bowie and Elton John influences all over this. He does ring Elton for advice after eating that protein snack though, right?
What About the Actual Song?
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Ryan: I don't know what you guys were expecting from Harry Styles but I've ruminated hungrily over enough pictures of Mick Jagger to have anticipated this comeback as being something akin to Exile on Main Street. Yes, Harry Styles doesn't do heroin. Yes, he (probably) doesn't own a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice. And yes, it is likely his veins do not run red and blue with the sound of Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters. But so what? You look like Mick Jagger, mate. Capitalise. I've already said far too much now but this could have been you, baby. You could have have owned the fuck out of this market. You could have been on the cover of various European editions of Vogue and Mojo! Next time have your manager call me.Daisy: Harry, why did you align yourself with Queen and Bowie and Prince, only to release something that sounds like a mid-range number from We Will Rock You the musical covered by The Verve covered by David Sneddon from Fame Academy? This whole thing is a reminder that before the tattoos and the STIs and the high fashion spreads, Harry was just one of five lads wearing casual M&S desert boots and performing a cover of "Torn" to Sinnita. It's kind of inescapable, really. Even if he'd released a video of himself screaming gutturally for 20 minutes before smashing some coke live on air, you'd still be thinking, 'yeah but… X Factor.'
Emma: Given that Harry Styles has been known to make distressing statements such as "Chris Martin is the reason I love music", in my head, this was going to go one of two ways: full Coldplay or full Queen, but it actually drifts somewhere in the middle. For a song that is nearly six entire minutes long, it doesn't really go anywhere; it introduces the melodies from the offset and just repeats them with additional crash cymbals. My biggest qualm, though, is that there's nothing about this that particularly screams "HARRY STYLES" to me. Anyone from Noel Gallagher to The Walkmen could've released this and I wouldn't be surprised. Still, props for the fact that this is a really weird song to drop in 2017 as a first solo single that isn't a pop banger or about romance. The lyrics sound like the musings of someone who is extremely concerned about climate change. My theory is that the world is definitely going to end in 2017 and only Harry Styles knows about it and wrote this song to play out while we all implode.
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