Is Harry Styles Ushering in a New Homebody Era with “Harry’s House”?

Hunkering down at home and still grappling with it two years later: Celebs, they’re just like us!

ICYMI on Wednesday, former boy-bander and watermelon enthusiast Harry Styles announced the title of his third album as a solo artist: Harry’s House. The album artwork features Harry standing puzzled in a sparsely decorated living room — turned upside down.

Fans like me are left to wonder if the album (to be released on May 20) is poised to offer a rare view into Styles’ home life during the early Covid lockdown days.

Time travel with me for a second: It’s March 2020. Styles, having recently released his sophomore album, Fine Line, in Dec. 2019, is gearing up to take “Love on Tour” live this summer. Then, in the wake of a viral pandemic, he’s forced to reschedule the tour. The then-26-year-old singer-songwriter — on the move since he was plucked out of a reality TV competition to join a globally successful boy band at 16 — suddenly has some unexpected downtime. 

So Harry’s at his House, with not much else to do but write some songs, eh? (He’ll also find time to act in not one but two feature films, both set to release this year.)

It certainly echoes what Styles told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe back then, when he revealed what his “new normal” lockdown routine looked like in an early radio interview on March 26, 2020: meditation, reading, walking, and yeah, writing songs.

“I’ve been writing so much,” he told Lowe two years ago. “To be honest, I’m doing some of the stuff that I should be doing more often anyway. I should be playing the guitar more. I should be writing poems and lyrics more. So I’ve been doing a lot of that.”

Back then, Styles also predicted that “a lot of powerful music” would come from musicians in their pandemic downtime:

“Ultimately you have people who have a need to express themselves through music and writing and film and so many different ways, who are now having a lot of extra time with no distractions,” Styles said. “It gives you an ability to have almost like a bird’s-eye view of the world and your life.”

Besides the album title and artwork, most of the other home-centric touchstones of this new era come from the “You Are Home” album teaser campaign and trailer. It kicked off last week with cryptic newspaper ads, social posts on Twitter and Instagram, a website, and a Discord server that all hinted at a home life turned upside-down.

Then there’s also that rescheduled live tour. Styles has already fulfilled his North American tour dates, but the Europe and South America stops rescheduled for this summer also reveal a shift between eras: The North American tour’s general admission pit sections were named after fruits, while the upcoming dates are named kitchen, bedroom, and hallway.

It’s still unclear what all the home-themed clues — lamps, vases, bedrooms, kitchens, arched doorways, mid-century modern furniture — have to do with Styles’ to-be-released music, and also what that music might reveal about his time in the early days of lockdown, but I can’t wait to listen and learn. (Was there sourdough? Just wondering.)

You can pre-save the album, which drops May 20, on Styles’ website.

Until then, if you want to channel the homebody-Harry energy for yourself: The You Are Home teaser campaign also prominently highlighted this 1000-piece mushroom-themed puzzle from Cavallini and Co. in the lead-up to the album announcement. The puzzle sold out quickly on the site where fans initially found and shared it, but you can still buy the puzzle from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Field Museum shop.