With his self-titled debut album finally out, Harry Styles has nearly completed his transformation into a young Mick Jagger replica. Styles already wears funky patterned suits to his promotional events, maintains his soft locks in a long and wavy fashion, and lives the bachelor lifestyle of a young Rolling Stone in London — but Styles is no imitator. This album is Jagger’s persona in sonic form, but at the same time, it allows Styles to prove he is a one-of-a-kind performer.
Between heartbreaking ballads like “Sign of the Times” and raunchy rock songs like “Carolina,” “Harry Styles” is an album full of Rolling Stones similarities but with a modern, younger and more individual perspective. It’s an album with universal appeal. Styles sings with a familiarity to fans who have known him since his One Direction days, but with more mature lyrics for a broader, more mature audience. As Rolling Stone magazine said in its review of the album, Styles is officially a “true rock & roll prince.”
Lyrics like these would definitely not be on any One Direction album, and Styles is using his own voice with confidence and no censorship. After all, the One Direction fans who have stuck with the band since they formed in 2011 are now older, generally more mature and ready for a different approach to love and life. They can relate more to lyrics like, “She worked her way through a cheap pack of cigarettes / Hard liquor mixed with a bit of intellect” than before.
In this album, Styles isn’t singing about the girl who caught his eye in the club, but about the after-hours emotions that come with a blurry night out, or everyday romance. In “Sweet Creature,” the most emotional track on the record, Styles sings about “two hearts in one home” that just aren’t on the same page. It’s a more mature perspective from someone who has now been through many relationships since the beginning of his musical career.
Then there are songs like “Kiwi,” a hard-rock track about a wild woman with whom he’s madly infatuated. He compares her to a stripper at one point and she claims to be having his baby. It’s a far cry from anything Styles has written about in the past, with One Direction or otherwise, and it’s how Styles is demonstrating his new sound of rock and maturity in lyricism.
He’s a solo act now with a soft-rock soul and it drips into each track. Whether it’s a quietly powerful melody like “From the Dining Room table” or the rowdy “Only Angel” where he shouts about a woman who’s an angel elsewhere but a “devil in between the sheets.” This album seems like it is exactly what the passionate rocker Styles wanted it to be, as he sings, co-writes and strums the guitar on nearly every track.
Get ready for the next few decades of Harry Styles, a former boyband star breaking out of a Mick Jagger-shaped shadow to be a contemporary rock artist with an old London style.

Watch the video for “Sign of the Times” below: