Every Song on Harry Styles's New Album Explained

Something we love about Styles is his ability to create a song that's a little bit of nonsense with a nonsense title. Enter: "Music For a Sushi Restaurant." Styles told NPR, "I was in a sushi restaurant in LA with my producer and one song came on from the last album. I said 'This is really strange music for a sushi restaurant,' then I thought, 'That would be a really fun title,' so as the song was being made [it stuck]."

In this scat-filled song that opens the album, Styles hits you right off the bat by singing, "Green eyes, fried rice, I could cook an egg on you." The song, while a total blast, doesn't give much in terms of lyrics. Styles sings of love and wanting a taste, so it seems safe to chock this one up to a bit of horniness and a lot of fun in the studio.

In "Late Night Talking," Styles seems to point to the early days of a relationship that he's quite excited about, wanting to spend time with his person talking all hours of the night and being bummed when they're not around. It also feels a little bit like infatuation, with lines like, "I've never been a fan of change / But I'd follow you to any place / If it's Hollywood or Bishopsgate, I'm coming, too."

Bishopsgate is located in England, and while it could be a spot he threw in as a lyric simply because it worked, it could also point to a romantic partner who was British as well. Either way, this song definitely feels like it's looking back on early those days of falling in love and experiencing the magic of nighttime when you can really open up to a new person in the quiet of the dark.

In "Grapejuice," Styles has what he calls the "grape juice blues," thanks, in part, to possibly a love gone wrong. In it he sings, "Yesterday, it finally came, a sunny afternoon / I was on my way to buy some flowers for you / Thought that we could hide away in a corner of the heath / There's never been someone who's so perfect for me / But I got over it and I said / 'Give me something old and red.'"

The whole song essentially alludes to a great bottle of wine, perhaps as a means of comfort, which implies needing a glass or two after a breakup. He also sings of a bottle of rouge, throwing in the year 1982 toward the end. (If you're asking yourself if that's when Style's girlfriend, Olivia Wilde, was born, it's not. She was born in 1984.)

"As It Was" is an interesting track because without listening to the words, you'd think this is a fun, upbeat track to dance to. While you can dance to it, the lyrics tell quite the sad story. Styles loves a sad bop! While some fans thought the song may be about Wilde, mostly because of the lines "Leave America, two kids follow her / I don't want to talk about who's doing it first," Styles has pointed to other experiences that drove this song.

When speaking to Sirius XM, he said the song is a "metamorphosis of just life," adding, "It's about growing as a person, your kind of natural evolution, and losing yourself, finding yourself, that time when you look back . . . There's a lot of times in life when different people want us to be different things and stay as one thing, and I think it's essentially, you know, even if you wanted to you can't go back to being the person you were before."

"Daylight" feels like another swoony love song where Styles curses the daylight because the time with his love is seemingly over. He sings, "If I was a bluebird, I would fly to you / You'll be the spoon / Dip you in honey so I could be sticking to you," alluding to wanting to constantly be near this person, so much so that he'd literally stick himself to them. It could possibly be a long-distance relationship, based on the opening lyrics, "I'm on the roof / You're in your airplane seat," which could point to Styles's partner jet-setting while he's impatiently waiting for them to return.

While talking to Howard Stern, Styles was informed of the fact that his ex Taylor Swift also has a song by this name. So is the song perhaps about his time with Swift? Seems like it's not. "You are reading too much into it," he told Stern. "You know I'd love to tell you that you're spot-on, but you're not . . . We will always wonder." However, on a more serious note, Styles did tell Stern, "It's kind of like . . . infatuation with chasing troubled things."

"Little Freak" seems to be another song about the past, specifically about a past love that's perhaps not fully resolved. In the chorus, Styles comes across as melancholic, but accepting when he sings, "I was thinking about who you are / Your delicate point of view / I was thinking about you / I'm not worried about where you are / Who you will go home to / I'm just thinking about you." This points to someone he was once with who has moved on, and though Styles has come to terms with it, he can't stop thinking about this person. There's also a line toward the end, "You never saw my birthmark," that leads us to believe perhaps this relationship or fling burned fast and died out quickly before they got intimate enough for Styles to show them the deepest parts of himself.

"Matilda" is a really powerful song about acceptance and moving on, disguised as a story about Roald Dahl's popular character. Telling lyrics like "You can let it go / You can throw a party full of everyone you know / And not invite your family 'cause they never showed you love / You don't have to be sorry for leaving and growing up" portray this. He told Apple Music that the song is about a specific person, though he said he hadn't told them that. He said he wanted to make the song for them with their story as it wasn't something he himself had lived. "I wanna support you in some way," he said of writing the tune. "But it's not necessarily my place to make it about me, 'cause it's not my experience. Sometimes it's just about listening. I hope that's what it did. I hope it just says 'I was listening to you.'"

He further told NPR that this can be interpreted as Dahl's Matilda all grown up and moving past her childhood trauma. "I think people have so much guilt with things that they don't necessarily need to have guilt with," he said of using the song as a form of self-care. "It's your right to protect the space around you and be protective of yourself and look after yourself."

There's definitely been speculation that "Cinema" could be about Wilde since it points to movies and he starred in her film "Don't Worry Darling." Stern actually asked Styles this question point blank, which he naturally evaded. "When I write songs, they kind of start out just, I guess, mine," he said of creating "Cinema." "I think it's important to write from what you're going through at the time and trying to turn life into what you make. I guess it's like, the most you can kind of capture a moment is kind of being true to that."

In the song, Styles sings, "I dig your cinema," as well as, "If you're getting yourself wet for me / I guess you're all mine / When you're sleeping in this bed with me." So while we can't be certain if it's about a specific person (it probably is, but we don't know who), it feels like it's certainly about sex.

"Daydreaming" only has a few lines of lyrics to go off of, but they're fairly telling. Styles sings, "Livin' in a daydream / She said, 'Love me like you paid me' / You know I'll be gone for so long / So give me all of your love, give me somethin' to dream about." It feels like yet another sexy song where Styles is sending a message to his lover that he wants plenty to think about while they're apart. Another slightly horny tune in Styles's playbook, "Daydreaming" definitely feels like a song where he's swept up in the emotions of love and lust.

"Keep Driving" is a breezy tune that demands to be played while you're literally driving down the highway with your windows open and your hair blowing in the wind. It feels exactly how it sounds, and the message behind it seems to be the same. The bouncy track hosts the over-and-over question of, "Should we just keep driving?" Styles seems to be asking that knowing that he and his companion are going to shut out everything else and just keep doing what they're doing. Whether this is in a romantic fashion or simply platonic, only Styles knows — but the message seems clear: he'll keep doing what he's doing.

Yet another sad bop, "Satellite" on the surface comes across fairly upbeat, but the lyrics scream pain. "Spinnin' out, waitin' for ya to pull me in / I can see you're lonely down there / Don't you know that I am right here?" Styles sings, calling out for his person to notice him. This could be in reference to a past romantic partner or perhaps someone he simply wanted in his life but couldn't make work. He sings over and over that he's right there, begging to connect. "Wishin' I could be there for ya," he sings repeatedly.

When Styles introduced "Boyfriends" at Coachella for the first time, he quite literally said, "To boyfriends everywhere, f*ck you." It's a song that's truly about boyfriends, specifically those who don't act right, with lyrics like, "Boyfriends, they think you're so easy / They take you for granted."

When talking to Apple Music, Styles said of the song, "I think the good part of it is that it is everything. It's both acknowledging my own behavior. It's looking at behavior that I've witnessed. I grew up with a sister, so it's watching her date people and watching friends date people, and people don't treat each other very nicely sometimes . . . And it was kind of one of those, it was one of those really quick, just say what you think of boyfriends."

Interestingly, the song also starts with the last line of the song reversed. The song ends with, "Feel a fool, you're back at it again," which sounds like gibberish in reverse at the beginning. However, this feels like a symbolic way of showing the cycle of getting caught up in your feelings and continuing to go back to that person you can't escape.

"Love of My Life" feels like Styles's epic love letter to home. With an album centered on the concept of home, it only makes sense to include a song that feels like it brings him back to where he came from: England. One lyric, "I take you with me every time I go away," alludes to that feeling of carrying home with you. For someone like Styles who has been on the move since he became a member of One Direction in 2010, it's hard to feel like you're still rooted somewhere. He's been jetting all over the world almost nonstop for more than a decade, but England will always be where he came from.

The chorus includes, "It's not what I wanted, to leave you behind / Don't know where you'll land when you fly," which also feels like a message to home after all the years of traveling and not spending much time in the UK. Alas, this love letter to England feels like a beautiful way to pay tribute to his roots.