Harry's House is the third studio album by English singer and songwriter Harry Styles, released on 20 May 2022 by Columbia and Erskine Records. The album was preceded by the singles "As It Was" and "Late Night Talking".
Background and release
English singer and songwriter Harry Styles announced the title of his upcoming third studio album as Harry's House on 23 March 2022, unveiling its artwork, a 40-second trailer and the album's release date as 20 May 2022. In the trailer, Styles steps on the podium of a theatre and grins while a "house façade" rises near him and synthesisers play in the background. Harry's House features 13 tracks. Joni Mitchell, who included a track called "Harry's House / Centerpiece" on her 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns, tweeted that she "love the title". Upon announcing the album, he set up an interactive website and a new Twitter account. The messages say "you are home" and "in this world, it's just us, you know it's not the same as it was". In an interview with Apple Music, Styles explained how he came up with the album title: "The album is named after Haruomi Hosono, he had an album in the '70s called Hosono's House , and I spent that chunk in Japan; I heard that record and I was like 'I love that. It'd be really fun to make a record called Harry's House'." The album features John Mayer on lead guitar on "Cinema" and "Daydreaming".
Promotion
"As It Was", was released as the lead single on 1 April 2022, after previously being announced on 28 March 2022. On 15 April 2022, during his Coachella headlining performance, Styles performed "As It Was" live for the first time, in addition to two then-unreleased songs from the album: "Boyfriends" and "Late Night Talking".
On review aggregator Metacritic, Harry's House received a score of 84 out of 100 based on 11 critics' reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote that the album "ticks a lot of the right boxes and has abundant charm, which makes it a perfect reflection of the pop star who made it". Reviewing the album for DIY, Emma Swann felt that while Styles alternately spends time "exploring vivid lyrical micro-vignettes" and then "obfuscating" the narrative on the album, he is "also not scared of being secondary to the song; a lesson it's taken many others far longer to learn". Nicholas Hautman of Page Six called the album Styles' "biggest sonic shift yet", writing that the artist is "a 21st century rock god who doesn't need to cater to anyone".