As they sat in the car in the dark, in the quiet of Maia Hess’s street, she opened her phone, finger hovering over the play button, anticipation crawling down their spines. The piano and harmonies of “Golden” by Harry Styles poured out the speakers of the car. “My jaw was on the floor… With every little thing I noticed, it got better and better, every song was better than the last,” said Lucy Kalista. As the chorus of the song came on they jumped in their seats with excitement. The new Harry Styles album was coming out at midnight, and major fans like Hess and Kalista couldn’t wait. Kalista, speaking about the first time listening sid,“I felt excited because his last one was really good, I was anxious in a good way.”

I’d recently heard some fans talking about the song “Falling” by Styles, how this song had made them cry. When I asked Lucy about her experience she said “ It reminded me of some songs from One Direction and so it brought me back. He produced something beautiful out of his sadness. I think it’s a song you can go to when you’re sad, know you’re not alone.’” “That was one of the ones where we were like ‘who hurt you?! We were really listening to the words trying to figure out who it was about.” Hess added. 

Harry Style’s new album “Fine Line” was released in December 2019 and Stylers went crazy. Styles released three singles before he dropped the album; “Lights Up,” “Watermelon Sugar,” and “Adore you.” Fans like Kalista and Hess loved them of course. Kalista said, “I thought Lights up was more like his last album, when I first heard it I was playing it on repeat. I was expecting ‘Watermelon Sugar’ to be like ‘Kiwi’ on his last album.” Kalista recalled a tweet Styles sent out in late Oct. saying “Kiwi walked so Watermelon Sugar could run” and therefore leading fans to think the songs would be similar “and that’s my one complaint.” Kiwi is a rock song. “a song that you can kind of scream your head too.” Fine Line doesn’t include something like that. 

Almost all the songs have a different story behind them. Styles explained a little bit about the process behind one of them in a Rolling Stones article saying, “Mitch played that guitar when he was a little, ah, influenced…. We had no idea what we were doing. We forgot all about that track, then went back later and loved it. But Mitch had no idea what he did on the guitar that night, so he had to learn it all over from the track.” 

The last song on the album “Fine Line” starts slow, with sounds resembling nature,    when the guitar comes in. Styles sings, “put a price on emotion…” with a desolate cadence. The girls looked at each other, “I already have tears in my eyes.” This time though, they don’t jump jump out of their seats. They sit, looking out the window and back at each other, just soaking in the music. The meloncholy melody goes on for a while when the song starts to pick up and you can see the girls’ smiles appear once again. The trumpets come and lift your spirits and once again the girls smile and silently jamming out. 

Styles started off in an American boy band, fitting what his fans wanted him to be. He has grown up and is now quite different than other contemporary male artists. Styles  finds it important to be able to express his emotions. As he said in a Rolling Stones interview  titled “The Eternal Sunshine of Harry Styles.” “I feel pretty lucky to have a group of friends who are guys who would talk about their emotions and be really open,” he said. Styles is a very unique artist in the way that he has no problem being feminine. For example, he shows up with “Gucci shades, a cashmere sweater, and blue denim bell-bottoms. His nail polish is pink and mint green. He’s also carrying his purse — no other word for it — a yellow patent-canvas bag with the logo ‘Chateau Marmont.’” Many fans believe he’s changing the idea of masculinity, which he does by being more femme than you would normally see men in pop culture. 

When I asked Hess and Kalista how they felt about Styles as a person they both smiled. Hess said “there are a lot of artists I listen to that I don’t like them as a person. Harry is just so supportive of anyone. In the past when we see him in concert he would sing with a gay flag. He makes his concerts a really safe space.  e’ll say things like “When you love the person that makes the music, it’s hard not to like their music because I know that they put their heart into it.” Kalista added, “that’s the whole reason that got me into him as a person. He’s not afraid to be feminine. He helps end toxic masculinity, he’s an advocate for ending it.” 

Styles is sometimes judged since, in Kalista’s words, “(some people think) if your fanbase is a bunch of teenage girls it discredits the artist. It’s a problem. They rule him out because a bunch of teenage girls like him. They need to stop looking down on us like we’re less of intellectuals.”