Following Harry Styles’s solo career is a little like getting a crash course in the male archetypes of the 2010s and 2020s.
On his 2017 debut, “Harry Styles,” released a year after his megaselling boy band One Direction went on indefinite hiatus, he was the playful star in louche suits, writing arena rock about broken hearts and one-night stands. For 2019’s “Fine Line,” he embraced light androgyny, appearing on the cover of Vogue in a dress and donning glittery cat suits as he traded seriousness for psych-rock ebullience. The Styles of 2022’s “Harry’s House” was the guy you know who’s into midcentury furniture and the kind of big, expensive pants that sell for four-plus figures at Ven. Space. The album, accordingly, dealt in light-touch synth arrangements inspired by, he said, Japanese city pop.
By speedrunning so many distinct aesthetics in such a short time, Styles was, in a sense, doing some heavy lifting for the rest of his musical brethren. During the 2000s and 2010s, white male stars tended to fit distinct archetypes: slick and well-groomed (“metrosexual”), like Justin Timberlake; perpetually teenage, like Justin Bieber; perpetually normie, like Ed Sheeran. There was not a lot of changeability in these modes. When Timberlake rebranded as a “Man of the Woods” in 2018, he was met with widespread derision — unlike stars of decades’ past like David Bowie and George Michael, whose modes shifted with each successive album cycle or, sometimes, from video to video.
For his fourth solo album due Friday, “Kiss All the Time. Disco Occasionally.,” Styles has revealed another new guy: On the album’s cover, he is depicted in jeans, big sunglasses and a baby tee. Styles said he discovered LCD Soundsystem and Berlin club culture between records, and, accordingly, has adopted a casual (heterosexual) clubgoer’s uniform — an impression made clearer by his recent performance at the Brit Awards, during which he was surrounded by a swarm of dancers wearing the same thing. Styles sported a shirt and tie tucked into pinstripe pants as he danced about the stage: the working man finally cutting loose.
“Kiss All the Time. Disco Occasionally.” is Styles’s first album in four years. His success with “Harry’s House” and its subsequent Love on Tour shows arguably reopened the floodgates for male pop stars, who have been making their way back to the Hot 100.
Benson Boone, a onetime “American Idol” hopeful, has parlayed TikTok popularity — and a propensity for doing flips while wearing Styles-style spandex — into a number of chart hits, while the former YouTube prankster Alex Warren’s 2025 single “Ordinary” was one of last year’s biggest successes, sitting at No 1 for 10 weeks. Bieber, now a father, broke out of his adolescent prison with “Swag,” an album of minimal R&B indebted to the influence of the indie stars Dijon and Mk.gee.
And, of course, there’s Shane Boose, the 20-year-old New Yorker better known as Sombr.
Sombr broke through in 2025 with a series of singles that quickly filtered up from TikTok and into the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including the dense, angsty megahit “Back to Friends.” His sound is distinct from Styles’s — it’s rooted in a pastiche of 2010s indie bands with shades of disco, produced and mixed with the sparkle and intensity of pop music — but there’s undeniably a bit of Styles in his persona, which is both safely puppyish and safely sexualized, and appeals to a young female audience.
At 6-foot-7, Sombr also looks like what would happen if you took Styles and stretched him. His onstage uniform largely consists of wide-legged ’70s-style suits, sometimes embellished with ornate embroidery, occasionally glammed up somewhat with sequins, jewelry and extremely low-cut shirts (or none at all).
Even if he is not directly inspired by Styles, Sombr is the kind of star who could only have made mainstream headway in a post-Styles world: Someone who plays with ostensibly vintage codes like guitars and suits, whose music is avowedly masculine (and heterosexual) but who toys with gender expression in ways that feel both modern and old-school. He is hardly a direct competitor to Styles — although he plays arena-size shows and is now seemingly omnipresent on the charts, Sombr is far from a household name, and his live performances suggest little of the polish that is inherent to Styles’s persona.
But his success suggests that the future of male pop stardom may be Styles-shaped, offering a little bit of what’s new and a lot of what’s old at the same time.
The post Harry Styles Left as a Dominant Male Pop Star. He Returns to a Crowd. appeared first on New York Times.
