‘Your World Is Waiting’: On ‘As It Was,’ Harry Styles Reemerges Different But Wiser (2024)

Try as he might, Harry Styles is no match for the perpetual motion of change. The 28-year-old musician is currently in a state of transformation himself, leaving a fresh bouquet of flowers at the grave of his sophom*ore era Fine Line and returning home to breathe life into his next artistic endeavor: Harry’s House, his third solo studio album, out May 20th.

The singer has been teasing the visual and conceptual landscape of the record through YouAreHome.co – the cryptic website that has been trickling out album easter eggs for the past two weeks. The site features an ivory colored door with a gold handle, unveiling a different image every day – from obscure snapshots of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to the Cavallini & Co. 1,000 piece mushroom puzzle and the neatly inverted Harry’s House album artwork. As the content hidden behind the doorway shifts daily, the accompanying You Are Home Twitter account shares brief, poetic messages with existential undertones. Two days before the new musical era launched with Styles’ first release in two years, a simultaneously freeing and anxiety-inducing note appeared: “Every place you’ve ever been will never stay the same, and neither will you.”

Whether threatening or comforting, the statement holds truth: On Harry’s House lead single “As It Was,” he tries his hand at coming to terms with feeling stuck within this very notion of impermanence, draping his musings over shimmering synths and thumping percussion courtesy of producers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson.

“Holding me back/ Gravity’s holding me back/ I want you to hold out the palm of your hand/ Why don’t we leave it at that?” Styles questions in the opening verse. “Nothing to say/ When everything gets in the way/ Seems you cannot be replaced/ And I’m the one who will stay.” Throughout “As It Was,” the singer presents a brightly dressed account of loneliness, fighting to unbind himself from the position he’s been affixed to while the world shifts around him. In the chorus, he sings: “In this world, it’s just us/ You know it’s not the same as it was.” How isolating must it feel to know that the only constant you can count on is inconsistency?

In the Tanu Muino-directed music video for the single, which appeared as today’s offering from behind the enigmatic door, Styles finds himself quite literally chasing a release. Sheathed in a long red coat, he steps through a doorway and emerges on the other side in a ruby sequin co-ord custom designed by Arturo Begero. Moving to the rotating platform in the center of the room, he brushes hands with a woman in a matching blue set – the first of many instances in which the intimacy he yearns for is just out of reach.

The endlessly spinning platform was directly inspired by “Celui Qui Tombe,” a theatrical, illusory performance piece created in 2014 by French director Yoann Bourgeois, who choreographed “As It Was.” The living presentation – which translates to “He Who Falls” or “The One Who Falls” – places a cluster of performers on a rotating stage where they run forward in hopes of fighting the perpetual motion, only to find that they consistently remain in the same place they started.

Bourgeois positioned Styles in this same conundrum. Whenever he embraces the woman in blue – wrapping his arms around her or shrinking his body into hers – it doesn’t last beyond the beat of a second. They go on and on in this cycle, running in circles until, eventually, she slips away completely. “As It Was” spotlights a different dimension of physical intimacy than the lustful scenes of Fine Line singles “Lights Up” and “Watermelon Sugar,” where Styles is enveloped in the heat of bodies. In order to obtain lasting comfort and warmth through embrace here, he must first reveal himself.

“I’m trying to generate empathy from the audience,” Bourgeois shared in a 2020 interview with NR Magazine. “The essential question is one of relationships. I’m considering the idea that, as beings, we are about relationships. A performance is something that only exists through the relationships of the present; it exists only here and now… And it’s here that the poets have their role to play.”

Once he’s on his own, we briefly return to Styles sheltered in his red coat as he remembers a damning phone call: “Harry, you’re no good alone/ Why are you sitting at home on the floor?/ What kind of pills are you on?” He begins to strip down to his briefs, one article of clothing at a time, and without hesitation, those around him follow suit – barring the woman in blue. It’s only then, after he’s fully revealed his most vulnerable state, that he’s able to pull her tight against his chest for longer than a moment. He’s done his part, but it doesn’t last. As they’re ultimately pulled apart by forces outside of their control, Styles falls back into the spinning platform’s endless routine.

He’s a couple rotations in when the camera catches a shift in the singer’s eyes – the freeing second when he realizes he can choose to end the futile chase. It happens as Styles is rattling off the sprawling bridge of “As It Was,” his mind moving at a mile a minute: “Go home, get ahead, light-speed internet/ I don’t wanna talk about the way that it was/ Leave America, two kids follow her/ I don’t wanna talk about who’s doing it first.” It’s a moment of resolve, like a gleaming lightbulb blinding his every cyclical thought about what lasts, and what doesn’t, in the face of the unending impermanence he could never control.

Maybe it wasn’t just gravity holding Styles back: Detangled from his thoughts, he dances his way outside while unraveling in the chiming bells of the final chorus. Bringing “As It Was” to a close, the singer demonstrates the kind of authenticity often reserved for the comfort and warmth of a home. The way that he launches his body into the air and glides across the floor, all unabashedly flailing arms and legs, reverberates the familiar freedom of the safe space that his live shows represent for his fans. On tour, Styles fosters an environment of liberation and exclusivity with his fans, one that encourages them to spend 90 minutes being the person they’ve always wanted to be, and which feels as though no one else is invited to view that untethered version of himself but them.

In the final moments of “As It Was,” Styles bursts through the short gates separating him from where he was and where he’s heading next, wherever that may be. He even leaves them open for any curious wanderers to follow suit, leading them forward with a heartening smile. The singer’s silent encouragement echoes the sentiment of the final message shared from You Are Home just ahead of launching the official Harry’s House era: “Your world is waiting.”