Harry Styles’ Radiohead moment

I remember when Radiohead’s “Creep” came out. I didn’t really pay attention to the lyrics, rather to the general mood of the song, dark and brooding, with that striking explosion of rage and despair from the moment those guitar scratches announce the chorus. Still a massive song in my book, even though the band famously hated it, only recorded it as a demo and never wanted it to be released. That’s how music history is written.

By all accounts, the album that came after that is their masterpiece, though: that would be 1997’s seminal OK Computer. Remarkable from start to finish, with beautiful pop-format songs like “Karma Police” or “No Surprises”, albeit on the darker, more subtle side, featuring what I consider to be one of the best rock songs ever made, the mini-rock opera that is “Paranoid Android”. You could tell that the band had been heavily experimenting in the studio, perfecting their sound by veering off straight-up rock stuff into more sophisticated stylings that included more and more tracks, keyboards and, dare I say, electronics.

Then they made the dive. The album after that, Kid A, and those that followed, embraced electronica, or rather this unique blend of rock, pop and synthetic layers that came to be known as the “Radiohead sound”. To be fair, millions of people celebrated it and many of the songs that were released from then on were indeed excellent. But they, in my humble opinion, never reached the pinnacle that was “Paranoid Android”’s perfect balance between rock and experimentation. Between subtle and powerful. Between indie and mainstream. An exercice so difficult most bands never get around to successfully executing it.

And that is precisely what could be happening to our friend Harry Styles. The first single to his fourth album, “Aperture”, presents a clear departure (no pun intended) from the perfect pop recipe that was Harry’s House and its infectious “As It Was”. Granted, Styles and Yorke are too widely different beasts, and the former One Direction member decidedly comes from pop rather than rock, but he developped an unmistakable aesthetic that allowed him to rise from his boy band youth into solo superstardom. To say he became one of the biggest pop artists out there is an understatement.

And now, the man performs electronic music. Good electronic music at that, but definitely not with the across-the-board appeal of his previous work. Unsurprisingly, “Aperture” shot straight to #1 on the Billboard 100, only to drop off the following week: the Harry Styles effect only goes so far. Whatever happens next, one shouldn’t be overly concerned for the singer: he’s gonna be alright. But if he wants to recapture that zeitgeist he so clearly grasped in the past, he might want to try avoiding the Radiohead trap…