BY LO U S TO P PA R D P H OTO S T I M WA L K E R
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ON HIS NEW ALBUM, HARRY STYLES EXPLORES THEMES OF BELONGING, PEACE, AND DISCOVERING DOMESTIC BLISS WHEREVER YOU CAN FIND IT. Looking back, it was undoubtedly risky suggesting to meet Harry Styles, the global music megastar, the apple of so many millions of eyes, at a public open-air swimming pool in London on an unusually sunny March morning—right when people were bouncing around the city with a vaguely manic, newly liberated energy, catalyzed by the total lift on COVID restrictions. But swimmers, particularly all-weather swimmers (the lido I chose is unheated and open yearround), take the meditative pleasure of swimming seriously, as Styles himself, who swims outdoors daily, knows well. “I feel like people who have discovered cold water swimming are just so happy for you that you’ve also found it,” Styles said. In other words, no one is hassling you for water-side photos. Indeed, around us, most swimmers were doing an admirable job of feigning indifference to the fact that an instantly recognizable pinup (the hair, the face, the tattoos) was stripped off, poolside. Styles has spent the last few years on a quest to enjoy things for what they are, to “be in the moment,” as he put it. Swimming is good for this; it’s hard to think about anything else when you are struggling to keep breathing. “That’s the thing with a swim,” he said. “It’s the one thing
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| June 2022
you never regret.” Just before the pandemic, in December 2019, Styles released his second solo album, Fine Line, to acclaim. The corresponding live shows, Love On Tour, were due to start in April 2020. But by then, the pandemic was raging; disaster declarations had been made across the U.S., and Europe was on lockdown. Styles had envisaged himself busy, playing packed shows each night, the music bellowing from his lungs, his pearls and sequins glittering in the light. Instead, nothing. “Suddenly, the screaming stopped,” he said. Everything was canceled, an end to the relentless merry-goround of attention Styles has been on since 2010—then a smiling 16-year-old in a skinny scarf that would hint at the kind of fey hipwiggling rocker he would go on to become a decade later—when he appeared on the British talent show The X Factor and was set on a conveyer belt to stardom. Now Styles was stuck in L.A. for months with nothing to do. “It was the first time I’d stopped since I left my mum’s,” he said. For a while, at the beginning of lockdown, productivity drilled into him, Styles felt like
