Harry Styles shouldn’t have been shortlisted for the Mercury Prize

Little Simz has been named as the winner of the 2022 Mercury Prize with her album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, and rightly so. This year’s ceremony unfolded much as it has in previous years, despite being rescheduled after the Queen’s death in September. And as with previous years, there was plenty of healthy competition to be found on this year’s shortlist: Simz with her ambitious, orchestral fourth album, Sam Fender with the rootsy, socially astute guitar rock of Seventeen Going Under, and Gwenno with her shimmering Cornish-language record, Tresor. Oh, and Harry Styles. Arguably the only one who didn’t deserve a nomination.

Styles has sought credibility from the instant he launched his solo career. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself – why shouldn’t a former boyband star seek artistic acclaim along with the adulation of his fans? No, it’s more the way Styles has gone about it. The Independent’s review of Styles’s self-titled debut observed how he tended to wear his influences on his sleeve. There were blatant nods to Elton John in the “Bennie and the Jets”-style intro to “Only Angel”; “Sweet Creature” brought to mind the bittersweet guitar-picking of The Beatles’ “Blackbird”. The single “Sign of the Times” was a clear reference to Prince’s 1986 song “Sign o’ the Times”, to the point that it was almost exactly the same length (five minutes 40 seconds to Prince’s five minutes and two seconds).

The 28-year-old has done his utmost to align himself with those artists in interviews, too. During promo for Fine Line, he made headlines by claiming to have taken mushrooms while recording in Malibu, to encourage himself to be “fun and creative”. This felt like less of a fun, spontaneous anecdote than a carefully placed story with which critics could draw immediate comparisons to his heroes. Meanwhile his flamboyant, gender-neutral fashion sense, aided by talented stylists, has been compared to the looks of Bowie and Prince. Credibility by osmosis.

Since his debut, Styles has turned his magpie tendencies up a notch instead of toning them down. His second album Fine Line remains his best to date, thanks to the pop-soul swoon of songs such as “Watermelon Sugar” and “Adore You”. But it’s still peppered with too-obvious tributes to his heroes. A review in Pitchfork suggested: “By corralling a new flock of influences—from Seventies power pop and Laurel Canyon folk-rock to the sort-of soul of Coldplay—Styles showcases his gift for making music that sounds like good music.”

Harry’s House has exactly the same problem. Its title comes from Joni Mitchell’s 1975 track “Harry’s House / Centrepiece” – about a married man’s shallow pursuit of vapid materialism over emotional connection. Yet Styles’s sepia-tinged Seventies and Eighties palette was considerably watered down from the lush and expansive landscapes painted by Mitchell. Every moment on the album – from the joyful blast of brass on “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” to the sun-soaked riff on “Daydreaming” – is laid down with calculated precision. There’s no joy, no sense of spontaneity. It’s soulless, particularly when compared to the “anything could happen” tension that abounds on Little Simz’s record, or the jittery energy and self-knowing winks to The Fall on Yard Act’s debut, The Overload.

You have to wonder why Styles is able to scatter myriad familiar-sounding guitar riffs, sax solos and piano sequences so audaciously and be lauded for it, when fellow pop giant Ed Sheeran is castigated for doing the very same. Is it because the music Sheeran references – mostly Nineties pop and R&B – is considered less worthy than the rock and folk heavyweights favoured by Styles? Of course, it’s easy to counter this with the fact that, arguably, there is no truly original music anymore. Every artist is influenced by something else, no matter how subtle they are, the links are there. The problem with Styles is, for the most part, his songs sound like weak imitations of someone better – as if he’s raided the dressing-up box for Laurel Canyon karaoke. He has no discernible “sound” of his own. At least Ed Sheeran always sounds like Ed Sheeran.

Regardless of whether a review is positive or negative, many critics have agreed that another bugbear about the former One Direction star is his habit of holding things back. While fans were able to glean that “Cinema” is about his current girlfriend, director Olivia Wilde, you can hardly praise their detective skills in this case, when the lyrics were as shallow as: “I bring the pop/ You got, you got the cinema/ I bring the pop to the cinema, you pop/ You got, you got the cinema.” And if you need further proof that Styles has trouble expressing himself eloquently, just check out the excruciating interview with his Don’t Worry Darling co-star Chris Pine: “You know my favorite thing about the movie? Like it feels like a movie... it feels like a real, like, go to the theater film movie that you know you kind of... the reason why you go to watch something on the big screen.” The twitch of Pine’s neck muscle was felt around the world. Styles’s remark, meanwhile, doesn’t scream of a man who’s bothered to think about the art he’s making that closely. Or, maybe, he just has nothing to say.

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Perhaps this explains why so many of the women depicted in his music are reduced to tired rock tropes – on his first two albums, at least – then condescended to on Harry’s House. “To boyfriends everywhere, f*** you,” he announces on “Boyfriends”, recalling the moment when – performing at Coachella festival – he declared that Shania Twain’s music had taught him from a young age that “all men are trash”. Casually condensing her decades of empowering, defiant yet nuanced country-pop into a naff faux-feminist slogan. The big problem, though, is still the lack of any true ingenuity, creativity or flair of his own, which is only brought into glaring focus when held up against the other Mercury Prize contenders.

The house that Harry built has a lot of style, but little substance.