A common misconception shared by boybands and their fans is that neither have discernable stylistic taste. In popular media – from Josie and the Pussycats’ Dujour to the more rockist-leaning music press – they are reduced to product and consumer, with the boyband’s music existing to enable the much more important products of parasocial desire, fantasy and merchandise. Now almost a decade into his solo career, ex-boybander Harry Styles undoubtedly still sells desire, fantasy and merchandise, but his personal taste is a key pull towards the investment. Through his music, visual aesthetic, and his curation of the Southbank Centre’s upcoming Meltdown festival, he acts as a prism for his (and his audience’s) taste. He reflects beloved cultural touchstones back as warm, welcoming and refreshingly uncomplicated in a world that is anything but, like a musician doing the work of a romance novel.
In the early years of both boybands and personal fandom, the misconception about taste is more aligned to reality. Boybands get put together when their members are teenagers, and perform the kind of music – sugary pop, syrupy ballads – that isn’t often enjoyed recreationally by teenage boys. Their fans are young too, at the age where tastes are forming and interests are being cycled through. Young girls like the commercial products that are being explicitly sold to them, but they also like other stuff. When I was 12 my wall was decorated with posters of 5ive, but also PJ Harvey and Pulp. I listened to a1 (the most underrated boyband of the era in my opinion), but also Tori Amos, TLC and my mum’s Eagles tapes.
I was 28 when I became a proper fan of Styles’ old band, One Direction – more than a decade older than the typical first-flush boyband fan. I’d seen their genesis on The X Factor in 2010 and had enjoyed plenty of their singles since then, but when their fifth album Made In The A.M. was released in 2015, I was hooked on its Wings-lite classic rock, and the Styles-written ‘If I Could Fly’, a descendent of the minimal, introspective singer-songwriter ballads that I’d had a soft spot for since I bought my first Jeff Buckley CD when I was 14. It wasn’t as good as any of that, of course it wasn’t – but it offered up these beloved touchstones with the generosity and servitude ingrained into a group designed explicitly to please girls.
Harry Styles released his solo debut the year I turned 30. Made In The A.M. would be One Direction’s last album before their ‘indefinite hiatus’ in 2016, when the manufactured whole could no longer contain the ambitions and personal tastes of four grown men (the fifth, Zayn Malik, left the year before). I was curious about Styles’ solo career – he had always been my favourite, and he was the most primed for crossover success and cultural legitimacy, the kind of popstar who could appear in high fashion editorials or the cover of broadsheet supplements. It was a surprise, then, that his first solo single ‘Sign Of The Times’ sounded like Oasis but good, or perhaps more accurately an early Robbie Williams single: an apocalyptic guitar ballad anchored by the inherent reassurance of Styles’ voice. It was too resolutely uncool to stem from anything but personal taste, and appealed to a desire for comfort in the hellscape of 2017 – a heartthrob holding your hand and telling you everything was going to be alright, in a musical language you were already fluent in.
The self-titled album that followed in May 2017 was delivered in the perennial language of the family CD collection: well-loved records by Fleetwood Mac and The Rolling Stones transposed into millennial pop with a wink and a smile. Styles’ second album Fine Line did the same with added psych-rock breeziness, like a sun-warmed journey down a Californian coast that you’d never actually taken, but had seen a dozen times in films with compelling romantic subplots. 2022’s Harry’s House was influenced by the city pop Styles had listened to on a visit to Japan, its title a direct reference to Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 classic Hosono House. Aptly slick and slyly melancholy, its strangeness was hidden in plain sight, in the wordless chorus of ‘Music For A Sushi Restaurant’, and in Styles’ growing preference for impressionistic, slice-of-life lyrics. Harry’s House is grounded in the revelation of a real person turning 30 and becoming more comfortable with his foibles, and the confidence of a pop star knowing they will be warmly received by the fans who have grown up alongside him.
Parasocial relationships are inherently unrequited, but Styles does give the impression that he is as obsessed with women as we are obsessed with him. His songs are punctuated with our names, and their narratives operate as a particularly meta version of fan fiction, written by the subject of the fantasy himself with space to insert yourself. At first, this space could be found in the vagaries and archetypes of his early love (and lust) songs: on the end of the phone line, at the dining room table where he’s waits for you, and in loosely-drawn characters of femme fatales (‘Kiwi’) and good girls (‘Carolina’). Latterly, you can find a particularity to align yourself with in one of his vignettes, like the film camera and yellow sunglasses of ‘Keep Driving’. Both bring their own kind of romantic pleasure; the ease of projection onto a trope, coupled with the discovery of a fragment of yourself within the framework of a complex, desirable character.
The feeling of kinship can deliver the same thrill as Styles’ positioning of women as lovers. On tour in 2023, Styles brought the female members of his backing band to the front of the stage to perform ‘Boyfriends’, a knowing cycle through the inevitability of romantic disappointment (“They don’t tell you where it’s heading / And you know the game’s never ending / But you lay with him as you stay in the daydream”) and ‘Matilda’, a poignant address to a woman cutting off ties with her abusive family (“You don’t have to be sorry for leaving and growing up”). The kinship is there in the gender-playfulness of his personal style and stage outfits, too. When he cites Shania Twain as his style icon, he’s speaking to how he embodies the masc-femme switching of ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman’ as much as his donning of sequins and feathers. This is especially appealing to queer people, of course – and I can only speak for myself here, but his switchy style also works as a kind of double layered fantasy of Styles dressing in your imaginary ex-girlfriend’s clothes. Whether this imaginary ex-girlfriend is a showgirl, a suited-up lesbian or a tattooed bisexual marathon runner, take your pick.
Of course, this can all be read as clever positioning, but there seems to be a genuine two-way understanding between us and him. Styles’ public image is carefully calibrated, but its raw material clearly stems from someone calling his own shots. He was trained on women’s needs, trained to meet our desires, and it seems like he took a genuine interest. Women are his most prominent influences and peers, too: he has duetted with heroes Twain and Stevie Nicks, and has toured with the likes of Mitski, Mabel, and Kacey Musgraves. The inspiration he’s taken from women artists can be traced in his Meltdown lineup, too – there’s connections throughout his work to the observational eclecticism of Nilüfer Yanya, the blissed-out beats of Erika de Casier, the tactile instrumentation of Fousheé, and the Californian ease of Warpaint.
On his just-released fourth album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, Styles remains a comforting prism for his and our cultural influences, but with an ever-widening scope. Its touchstones are melancholy, inherently nostalgic electronic records by the likes of LCD Soundsystem and the Postal Service. Lead single ‘Aperture’ is the sound of a rave filtered through a memory, the synths still pulsing through the fog of the morning after. The album is messier than Styles has been before, loose in both its song structures and lyrics – the “hangover chasing” of ‘Coming Up Roses’ and the Dionysian indulgence of ‘Pop’ are sweetly suggestive of life experience gained later than usual, in the year off from being a pop star that Styles took before making the album.
Styles’ ever-diversifying musical taste is also evident in the eclecticism of his Meltdown lineup. It’s no surprise to see that he’s a fan of queer electronic pioneer Beverly Glenn-Copeland, whose beautiful music embodies the kind of earnest sentiment and transcendence that Styles is aiming towards. Elsewhere, we can spot a burgeoning interest in dance music (Ninajirachi, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy), a proclivity for weird British humour (Getdown Services) and a desire for kinship with musicians who make unexpected left turns (Devonté Hynes performing new contemporary classical works). Like many music-enthusiast men in their 30s, Styles is getting into jazz; like not-so-many of them, he has the pull to book shows by Ethiopian jazz icon Mulatu Astatke, modern day legend Kamasi Washington and Shabaka from Sons of Kemet. Between his curation of Meltdown and his recent interview with Haruki Marakami (they are both keen marathon runners), it seems that the cultural establishment is catching up with Styles’ fans, and taking his taste seriously.
Around the release of Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally I noticed friends taking interest in Styles who hadn’t before: friends who listened to James Holden and Jon Hopkins (also on the Meldown lineup) – who had never been boyband fans or 12-year-old girls or 28-year-old women. A friend about ten years older than me mentioned that the album (and the Murakami Runner’s World interview) were a big talking point with his running club of middle-aged dads. It’s genuinely lovely to see this gradually increasing appeal to wider audiences because he’s never once left us behind. And at 38, I still feel that nonsensical but very real feeling of affinity when Styles shows an alignment with my proclivities, like when he records at Hansa studios like R.E.M. and the Bad Seeds and countless more of my favourites have done before him, or plays a modular synth onstage during his Live In Manchester Netflix documentary – whether he can actually play anything remarkable on it or not. My running friend told me that everyone in his household – him, his wife, his pre-teen and teenage kids – loves Styles, but all for slightly different reasons. What a balm to have a pop star able to hold so many of our reference points at the same time, who is able to offer them back to us with such security, care and devotion.
To find out more about Meltdown 2026, visit the Southbank Centre website
