Harry Styles New Single “As It Was”: Fan Theories & A Fresh Sound
Harry Styles latest single "As It Was" has broken a number of records. Source: flickr
Harry Styles released his first single “As It Was” from his new album Harry’s House, which will be released on May 20 of this year.
The release of this new single and the long awaited album announcement comes more than two years after his sophomore album, Fine Line, was released. Fans were quick to see new activity from Styles on the website YouAreHome.co where an animation of a door opens to a new design daily. A Twitter page by the same name began tweeting short sentences where the lyrics for “As It Was” appeared ahead of its release. Speculation around new content from Styles was confirmed on March 23 when he announced the release of Harry’s House and eventually the release of “As It Was” and its accompanying music video on April 1.
Fan theories began to pop up after the release of “As It Was,” with many taking to social media to dissect the lyrics, analyze the music video and put together the hints Styles had been dropping. In an interview with SiriusXM, Styles said that his fans usually never overlook any hints purposefully dropped, but will also find coincidences that were not planned. “Most of the time they usually pick up on pretty much everything along with a couple of hilarious coincidences that we never meant to be,” Styles said.
In one of these coincidences, fans began comparing the lyrics and music video for “As It Was” to the movie “The Matrix,” with its “red pill, blue pill” dilemma. The lyrics in the song “what kind of pills are you on” along with the visual of Styles in a red costume with his counterpart in the video in a blue costume lead fans to speculate upon a deeper meaning to the song. The Twitter thread created by @onlytheavocados that delves into this fan theory has gained over 7,000 likes and over a thousand retweets.
Theories about the other songs included in the upcoming album have been fueled by hints left by the You Are Home website, Instagram page and Twitter feed. One such hint alludes back to the Fine Line album with the concept of an island called “Eroda” that appeared in the music video for Styles’s song “Adore You”, released in December 2019. The map for this fictional island appeared to be shown behind one of the doors on the You Are Home website and Instagram page on April 2, along with a tweet the same day that reads “find new ways and make new maps.” This led fans to believe that Eroda will be making a comeback in Harry’s House.
Beyond the theories that fans have been able to create, “As It Was” has become a record breaking single recognized by Guinness World Records and has been charting number one on the Billboard Hot 100 over the last week. A TikTok trend where people post photos of themselves over the last few years to show how they’ve changed has only furthered the single’s popularity, with the song being used for videos over 600 thousand times.
In an interview posted by Hits Radio on YouTube, Styles explains that “As It Was” was the last song written for the album that was originally going to be a slower song. After working on the song further, “it kind of turned into that synth and it kind of just took on a new life,” Styles said.
As for Harry’s House as a whole, Styles explained that the concept went from the idea of a literal house to “more of an internal journey of finding home and peace with oneself.” Styles said that this album has some of the best content that he has ever written and that he is “really, really proud of it and [he’s] really excited to finally be able to start sharing it with people.”
Going forward, fans can look forward to what is in store for the rest of Harry’s House, and can also catch him appearing in two new films, headlining the Coachella festival and beginning the European leg of his Love On Tour world tour.