Harry Styles Is Still Getting Used to Being Harry Styles
As his Together, Together tour arrives at Madison Square Garden, the Grammy winner opens up about stepping away from the spotlight and returning to the stage with a new perspective on fame, his fans, and himself.
As Harry Styles sang, “I know what you like, I know what you’ll really like,” at the first of his six Mexico City concerts this summer, a girl in the pit turned to her friend and yelled, “He’s talking about me!” She was surrounded by 68,000 people, all packed into an outdoor stadium in the rain to see Styles’s Together, Together tour, for his fourth solo album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.
Since 2010, Styles has released nine albums and toured for a cumulative five years and eight months. About half of all that was with the British boy band One Direction, which he joined as a swooshy-haired 16-year-old. After the band went on an “indefinite hiatus,” in 2016, Styles quickly matured from teen pop idol to respected solo artist. Between his previous album, the 2022 hit Harry’s House, and his latest, Styles finished a very long tour, moved to a small paparazzi-free Italian town, and went out—not as one of the biggest pop stars of the decade, but as a regular guy—to LCD Soundsystem concerts and clubs like Berghain. As a result, his new music sounds different. His first solo albums leaned in to 1970s and ’80s rock, a little David Bowie and Elton John; the latest one is more electronic pop, a little James Murphy and Berlin techno.
For the Together, Together tour, Styles is doing a series of residencies—just seven cities, but longer stretches in each. First was Amsterdam; then London, where he had 12 sold-out nights at Wembley Stadium. For W, the photographer David Sims went to his final London show, on July 4, and took photos as Styles danced like a boy at a rave and played a modular synth behind his back. A few weeks later, they met in Mexico City for portraits. The centerpiece of Styles’s tour is a 30-show stretch at New York’s Madison Square Garden, his only U.S. stop. He’s doubling his 2022 Garden run, which earned him a banner in the rafters. Every night is sold out, which means that over 10 weeks, more than 500,000 people will dance with him in that arena.
Julio Torres interviewed Styles a few days after seeing him perform in Mexico City. The writer, director, and actor’s work is whimsical and uncopyable: Take his comedy specials, Color Theories and My Favorite Shapes, which imagine the backstories and inner lives of inanimate things such as the color navy and the airplane curtain between first class and coach. Needless to say, he and Styles respect each other’s work. —Jensen Davis
