Every Harry Styles Song Ranked

Harry wilds out on the dulcimer, dreaming about wide-open West Coast skies. “Canyon Moon” is a song about going home, but also a song about making a home in your memories, taking your loved ones with you every time you go away. Harry got so obsessed with his idol Joni Mitchell (“I was in a pretty big Joni hole”), he and Kid Harpoon tracked down Joellen Lapidus, the woman who built Mitchell’s dulcimer for Blue. She not only made one for Harry, she gave him and Kid Harpoon their first dulcimer lesson at her house. His next album, Harry’s House, shares a title with a 1975 Mitchell song. Harry tagged “Canyon Moon” as “Crosby, Stills & Nash on steroids” — no wonder it was Stevie Nicks’ fave song on Fine Line.Best line: “She plays songs I’ve never heard/An old lover’s hippie music, pretends not to know the words.”

A beautiful soft-rock heartache ballad — and a turning point for his songwriting. “’Two Ghosts’ I wrote for the band, for Made in the A.M.,” he said in 2019. “But the story was just a bit too personal.” This is the song where he realized he needed to tell these stories by himself. In “Two Ghosts,” he’s dancing by the refrigerator light with a lover with red lips, blue eyes, white shirt. (But did they move the furniture so they could dance?) Note: Bob Dylan is conspicuously absent from Harry’s pantheon of classic rock idols — he just can’t get past the voice. But in the Behind the Scenes documentary for the album, he does a hilariously precise imitation of Dylan wheezing “Two Ghosts” (around the 13:45 mark). It’s one of the funniest damn scenes in the film.Best line: “We’re just two ghosts swimming in a glass half empty/Trying to remember how it feels to have a heartbeat.”

In April 2019, when he thought Fine Line was nearly done, he got a blaze of inspiration and came up with three crucial songs in the final week: “Adore You,” “Lights Up,” and “Treat People With Kindness.” (Hey, the Beatles wrote half of Rubber Soul in a week.) “Adore You” seduced pop radio so fast, it’s easy to overlook how radical it is musically — a Top 10 hit with a guitar solo? It wasn’t done at the time, until this guy did it. The Rosalía-narrated video is one of his most touching, starring Harry as a peculiar boy bringing love to the fish of Eroda.
Best line: “Walk in your rainbow paradise/Strawberry lipstick state of mind.”

The epic finale of his second album, building over six minutes, from folky strums to horns and strings. “Fine Line” has the introspective power of the final scene of Fleabag, where Phoebe Waller-Bridge takes one last look before taking off on her long, cold solitary walk home in the dark. (A fan did a brilliant video syncing the scene with this song — it keeps getting pulled off YouTube, but try it.)Best line: “I don’t wanna fight you and I don’t wanna sleep in the dirt.”

“Watermelon Sugar” blew up into his first Number One hit, a playful summer guitar groove that moves like Bill Withers sipping a mushroom milkshake, flirting with every item in the food-and-produce aisle. Not bad for a song so eccentric, it almost got cut from the album. “That one we reworked a bunch of times, and it died a couple times,” Harry told Rolling Stone in 2019. “Then it just kept coming back. We fully killed it a few times, but it kept coming back in. So I thought, ‘There’s a reason it’s surviving.’” As co-writer and sidekick Kid Harpoon put it, “To break through with a song called ‘Watermelon Sugar’ about oral sex is awesome and kind of fun.”Best line: “Tastes like strawberries on a summer evening/And it sounds just like a song.”

Weird as it seems now, a lot of people just weren’t ready to hear Styles do a straight-from-the-heart confession as great as “Ever Since New York.” (People were so fixated on 1D as a cultural phenomenon, they slept on the group’s musical brilliance in “Stockholm Syndrome” or “Story of My Life.” Crazy, right?) “Ever Since New York” sounds hushed but intense, with so much empty space in the music, just Mitch Rowland’s guitar strums and Harry pleading, “Tell me something I don’t already know.” He feels lost in his room, not sure whether he’s praying or just talking to the walls. But he knows he’s disconnected from where he wants to be.Best line: “Brooklyn saw me, empty at the news/There’s no water inside this swimming pool.”

Damn right we’re including the new tunes he debuted at Coachella — it might be cheating to count “Late Night Talking,” since he’s only sung it in public once, but it’ll sound even sweeter when the studio version drops. “Late Night Talking” is a suave turn-your-love-around moonwalk through Eighties R&B, perfect for roller-skating, about how intimacy warps your mind and alters your life. Harry makes a Carole King-style pledge of devotion, vowing, “I’d follow you to any place/If it’s Hollywood or Bishopsgate/I’m coming too.” (The theme of cross-country romance fits right in with “As It Was,” on which he sings “Leave America, two kids, follow her.”)Best line: “Nothing really goes to plan/You stub your toe, I break your camera.”

The beatific opener for Fine Line, with wave upon wave of Seventies AM radio mellow gold. But under all the sunshine, there’s a sense of loss, as he begs, “I don’t wanna be alone.” “Golden” was the first song written for the album, on the second day of the sessions. As he said, “That was just always going to be Track One.” “Golden” has one of the most exhilarating climaxes in his music: The perfect moment when everything stops dead, Harry declares “I know that you’re scared because I’m so open,” and it rips into that pleading guitar break. Best line: “I’m hopeless, broken, so you wait for me in the sky.”

A massively quiet song that still seems to silence any room where you hear it. “Sweet Creature” is just a boy and a guitar pondering the dilemma of two hearts figuring out how to fit together. It’s a meditation on the concept of home, and how home is something you make up as you go along — themes he was exploring long before Harry’s House. But his voice packs enough emotion to pierce your heart. “Sweet Creature” sounds fragile, yet you gasp out loud when he hits that chorus: “When I run out of road/You bring me home.” Best line: “We don’t know where we’re going, but we know where we belong.”

“Lights Up” was the first taste of the Fine Line era — a sashay into the pop future, going for head-spinning disco late-night bliss. On one level, it’s a love song to his fans and how they helped him find his way after the demise of 1D. But “Lights Up” captures the moment where you step into the light and finally recognize your true self, even if the light is just coming from the glittering mirror ball in your heart. “I think ‘Lights Up’ came at the end of a long period of self-reflection, self-acceptance,” he told Rolling Stone. “I just had the conversations with myself that you don’t always have. And I just feel more comfortable being myself.” “Lights Up” is full of doubt and fear, yet it’s also an exuberant pop celebration. Best line: “Lights up and they know who you are/Do you know who you are?”

Harry at his lustiest, glammiest, raunchiest, and just plain best. “Medicine” has been one of his most fiercely beloved fan faves since his early shows — a depraved, sex-crazed Stones-y rock & roll strut. But somehow he’s never released it officially. So “Medicine” is a song that fans light candles and pray for. When he pulled it out of his clown suit at the HarryWeen bash in New York last October, for the first time in years, the crowd exploded at just the sound of drum goddess Sarah Jones counting in. The climactic hook is when he yells: “The boys and the girls are in/I mess around with them /And I’m OK with it!” The official lyric is “them,” but most ears hear it as “him” (including mine), and obviously he relishes the ambiguity, so nobody’s wrong — may the debate rage forever. A great way to see the song evolve: this fan-made mastercut of every time Harry sang the line “and I’m OK with it” on tour.Best line: “And when I sleep I’m gonna dream of how you tasted!”

Love — the most psychedelic of drugs. “She” is a deranged six-minute space-sex trip that feels like Prince jamming with Pink Floyd. It’s Harry and his loyal crew at their most unhinged, which is probably why he loves this song so much. Halfway through “She,” Mitch Rowland steps into the stratosphere for a cosmic guitar voyage. “Mitch played that guitar when he was a little, ah, influenced,” Styles said. “Well, he was on mushrooms, we all were.” They forgot about “She” until they went back later. “But Mitch had no idea what he did on guitar that night, so he had to learn it all over from the track.” “She” is the kind of fucked-up beauty you can only get from making music with trusted friends — Kid Harpoon, Tyler Johnson, Jeff Bhasker, Rowland — instead of hired guns. And throwing the rulebook out the damn window.Best line: “She lives in daydreams with me/And I don’t know why.”

One of the absolute highlights of Harry’s House, his best album, and he just introduced it at Coachella, which means it’s fair game, though there’s no way to begin processing the beauty of “Boyfriends” without hearing the real thing. (It would rank even higher if we were going by the finished version.) As he said when dedicating it live, “To boyfriends everywhere: fuck you!” The song dissects a man so pitifully out of touch with women (like the dude from “She”?), he can only relate by turning them into a “daydream.” It’s full of empathy for the girlfriend who’s misunderstood and taken for granted, who doesn’t want to live in that daydream anymore. The vibrant folk guitar evokes the Paul Simon of “I Am A Rock” or “Armistice Day.” Since Harry grew up in a pub hearing Simon and Garfunkel constantly, he knows this turf well. But S&G never had a song like this. “Boyfriends — are they just pretending?” is a tragically timeless question.Best line: “You love a fool who knows just who to get under your skin/You still open the door.”

Harry, you’re no good alone. “Falling” is the gorgeously bereft piano ballad from Fine Line, chronicling the afterlife of a broken relationship, asking, “What am I now? What if I’m someone I don’t want around?” He returns to places haunted by memories — “the coffee’s out at the Beechwood Cafe” — but it’s not the same. If this song doesn’t make a mess out of you, are you even there?Best line: “I’m well aware I write too many songs about you.”

Harry’s got a taste for soul-searching, reflective tunes. This is not one of them. “Kiwi” is a glam-punk body-slam guitar blast from his debut, inspired by a chic actress who’s “hard liquor mixed with a bit of intellect.” It’s driven by sex, adrenaline, pounding guitars, and the ridiculous chorus “I’m having your baby/It’s none of your business!” When Harry busts “Kiwi” out at the end of a live show, it always brings down the walls of Jericho. Let’s just say the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has used this moment as the definition of “euphoria.” Best line: “New York, baby, always jacked up/Holland Tunnel for a nose, it’s always backed up.”

The most powerful moment on Fine Line, a raw confession of grief and jealousy after a broken romance. Harry tells the story with dry wit, aiming his barbs at himself, even when the pain is real. (“I can tell that you are at your best/I’m selfish so I’m hating it” is really twisting the knife.) In the studio, engineer Sammy Witte was playing an acoustic guitar riff that Harry overheard and loved — so close to John Lennon on the White Album — resulting in this song. “Cherry” ends with a voice note of his ex-girlfriend, Camille Rowe, speaking French on the phone. A heart-wrenching song that nonetheless soars to the sun.Best line: “I still miss your accent and your friends/Did you know I still talk to them?”

The first taste of his upcoming album, Harry’s House, and an instant Number One hit. “As It Was” is a seductive dance-floor synth-pop bop — yet it’s also the most nakedly vulnerable tune he’s ever done. It opens with the voice of his goddaughter, angry about a missed call. (“Come on Harry, we wanna say good night to you!”) But even when he feels down and out, the breathy intimacy in his voice makes it feel like this is a shared story between two people. The ecstatic chimes ringing at the end are Harry, playing “tubular bells.” Total genius, done and dusted in three minutes. What a way to kick off the Harry’s House era, almost exactly five years after his debut single. And this is just the beginning.Best line: “Answer the phone/Harry, you’re no good alone/Why are you sitting at home on the floor?/What kind of pills are you on?”

The last thing the world was expecting from Harry Styles. His first solo single after One Direction wasn’t a pop banger, it was a nearly six-minute love-and-death piano epic. Talk about an audacious career move: He was aiming for the high ground of Bowie, or Prince, or Queen. As Harry told Rolling Stone in 2017, it’s sung from the perspective of a mother dying in childbirth. “The mother is told, ‘The child is fine, but you’re not going to make it.’ The mother has five minutes to tell the child, ‘Go forth and conquer.’” That’s why “Sign of the Times” feels uplifting, finding beauty in bleakness. The song made an instant impact — it hit Number Four in the U.S. — but it just gets more powerful as you live with it over the years. (It’s a totally different song if it happens to carry you through a grief experience.) “Sign of the Times” seems to pack a lifetime’s worth of hope into a few minutes. After this, nobody doubted Harry Styles again. Best line: “Just stop your crying, it’s a sign of the times/Welcome to the final show/Hope you’re wearing your best clothes/You can’t bribe the door on your way to the sky.”