Not everyone gets famous as a teenager—and even fewer escape the experience intact. So congratulations to Harry Styles, who would’ve been fine had he retired after One Direction but instead went on to become one of the more interesting and adventurous pop stars of his era. “I think there’s a lot of things that used to feel like, Okay, there’s a part of your life, then there’s a hard stop, then there’s a next part of your life,” he told Apple Music around the release of 2022’s Grammy-winning Harry’s House. “Things that used to feel so unbelievably foreign to me, sort of terrifying—like, I’m not 19 anymore, so I’m less terrified. And realizing [life’s] just one thing, and not chapter over, bye-bye.” Perspective: It helps, whether you’re out there in front of 50,000 people or performing the very first Apple Music Live session. Part of what made One Direction great was that they never shied away from the pleasures of boy-band pop but never patronized their audiences, either: Never mind the no-dancing policy; they wrote their own songs and cultivated their own musical perspectives. Beyond his precision-tooled indie-curious pastiche of classic pop, soft-rock, psychedelia, and soul, Styles’ lyrics capture a playfulness and emotional specificity that feels unusual for pop so big, whether it’s the flirtation of “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” (“Green eyes/Fried rice/I could cook an egg on you”) or the image of a kid outrunning an unhappy home on “Matilda” (“You were riding your bike to the sound of ‘It’s No Big Deal’”). That life he’s pontificating about? Listen to the music and you can almost hear him living it.