Review: Watermelon Sugar freshens Fine Line

Harry Styles changes his style in Fine Line

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Harry Styles debuts “Watermelon Sugar” on “SNL”

Juno Le, Staff Writer

Harry Styles brings back hope for his upcoming album. The first song he released from his Fine Line album, “Lights Up”, was not one of my favorite songs from Styles’s solo career, yet the album hasn’t failed me after I listened to his most recent single, which was dropped during his performance on “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 16.

Styles’s song starts off with a crisp, cool, summery-feeling. His lyrics, “tastes like strawberries on a summer evening,” imply that he’s talking about a past summer-love, likely to be Camille Rowe. On of Rowe’s favorite books was In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. It’s fun to listen and dance to, disregarding that it’s likely many of his upcoming songs will be more open about his breakup with the French model. “Watermelon Sugar” has no ounce of sad mellowness-it’s the perfect song to listen to on a warm day.

The pre-chorus takes place with Styles residing in his past memories, mellowing the song and giving you that nostalgic feeling. Styles cherishes his past memories rather than suppress them, as compared to “Woman” from his debut studio album.

His repetitive and catchy chorus of “watermelon sugar high” brings up the mood and returns you to happy emotions in recalling your memories. The release of the song seems oddly out of place as it’s more warm and summer in comparison to the cold-ish weather moving in, yet it also makes sense in the ideal that Styles is longing and waiting for that summer-feeling to return.

That longing continues as the song ends, where he begins to imply how he misses his summer fantasy. It seems as though Styles wants to slip away from his reality and get lost inside his fantasy. “Watermelon Sugar” is one of Styles’s more upbeat works from his solo career. It nods to Styles’s Fine Line songs being newly optimistic, which I’m definitely looking forward to. Styles is turning his music around in a different way as compared to his first album, so hopefully when the rest of Fine Line is released on December 13, it’s a good collection.