Is Harry Styles about to drop a new album?

Written by on 05/12/2021

Last night, Harry Styles played the final night of the American leg of his Love on Tour show in Long Island, which travelled the country in support of his second album Fine Line. It’s been a long-time coming (merci Ms Corona) — a whole two years since the record dropped — but the wait was worth it, and on stage, it’s the best we’ve seen him. So what’s next? A European leg? Asia? Well, from Harry’s side it’s crickets, which has led fans to believe he’s mustering up something bigger in between: a third album. 

Yep, time has simply ceased to exist since the pandemic started so, while Fine Line is still riding high in the UK and US charts over 100 weeks after it debuted, Harry is rumoured to be now moving onto something new. How do we know? Well, because Harry’s stans could solve the Da Vinci code if it meant understanding when he’d next release music.

So what clues do we have so far? Well, Deux Moi — the sometimes enlightening, sometimes unreliable anonymous celebrity gossip account on Instagram — has had a handful of submissions that allude to an album dropping the week of Valentine’s next year, which has led some fans to mentally prepare for the possible trauma of being single when HS3 is released. Then there were rumours of him recording something for Apple Music in the Highland Park district of LA. Is any of this true or verified? Well, no. It’s all semi-sourceless hearsay, but at this point even morsels of information are exciting the starved stans who haven’t yet seen the live tour.

When he was in New York City around Harryween (his live show at Madison Square Garden for Halloween, of course), he was spotted heading into the Sony Music offices, which might have been an innocent catch-up with his team (likely!) or a master plan meeting for his third record. Adding to the evidence, back in September, as songwriter Amy Allen — one of the geniuses behind the god-tier “Adore You” — picked up the prize for Most Performed Work at the Ivor Novello Awards for that track, she mentioned briefly that she was “psyched to hear his new album coming out”, which must mean that something is on the way. 

But the stans have gone seriously deep on this. Like, wildly so. They’ve suggested that Greg Williams, who Harry recently followed on Instagram, is the man behind the cover art, though we’d suggest that it’s more likely to be a magazine shoot, considering the stylised nature of the photographers he’s collaborated with on artwork so far (Harley Weir and Tim Walker). 

There’s even a theory that this new era has already begun, and he’s alluding to its colour scheme through a trio of looks at some of his final shows in LA: black and green. 

As Miley Cyrus famously once shrieked: What does it mean? Truth be told even we don’t know at this rate, but considering we’re two years into the Fine Line era and we’ve not yet had a single announcement for the rescheduled European tour, it’s not wild to assume that he’ll be moving into the new year after his movie-packed 2021 with a new album era. God bless HS3, may it be as miraculous as its predecessor.


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