The day Harry Styles fans worldwide didn’t know they had been waiting for arrived early April with the release of “As It Was,” a bouncy synth-pop sing-along that constitutes the singer’s first new music since December 2019’s Fine Line. What’s more, it was the lead single off his third LP, Harry’s House.

The seven-second teaser for the album, contained a few notes from the song, hit YouTube the previous week, generating immediate and considerable buzz. No surprises there; by now he’s proven a pop mainstay. Over the course of two solo albums, Styles has endeared himself to listeners of a range of genres and garnered a legion of devotees, some of whom have been with him since his teen days as one-fifth of One Direction and some of whom had no knowledge of or interest in his boy-band past. As he has come into his own as an artist, he continues to use his prominent spot on the world stage for good, advocating for LGBTQ+ visibility and taking his mantra “treat people with kindness” from the title of one of Fine Line’s better-known tunes. All this to say there were plenty of people dying to hear what he would do next.

One thing that sets Styles apart from many of his contemporaries, including One Direction fellows like ZAYN (Zayn Malik) and Liam Payne, is his obvious reverence for past—what one might call “classic”—musical eras. In both craft and performance practice, he has taken inspiration from the likes of David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, and the Laurel Canyon community in the ‘70s; he seems in many ways like an updated version of a rock star from that period. Consistent with the fashion, and moving in the same chronological direction, he tests the limits of his sound on the distinctly ‘80s-influenced “As It Was.” A sunny synthesizer figure floats above a propulsive electronic beat, backed by sustained (mostly major) chords and punctuated by the occasional chime of a bell. The pitches Styles sings rarely stray from a contained range, with the exception of the titular line in the chorus “you know it’s not the same as it was.” The melodic hooks, both instrumental and vocal, are accessible enough to have you humming along by the end, under three minutes later.

As Genius notes (the lyrics were the most-read on the site for the song’s debut weekend), it’s a deceptively cheerful sound for the situation and emotion the text expresses. One might guess as much from the opening line, “Holding me back,” and its clarification “gravity’s holding me back.” And while it goes on to describe the aftermath of a dissolved relationship, probably romantic (“Leave America, two kids follow her/I don’t want to talk about who’s doing it first”), it’s difficult to ignore the song’s place in a larger context, or to refrain from superimposing that context onto it. A lyric that demands “Why are you sitting at home on the floor?” knows that its audience has been doing just that since early 2020. Coming from a singer whose brand is to catalogue the peaks and troughs of individual feeling, and whose last record appeared mere months before the widespread sociological trial of the COVID-19 pandemic, “you know it’s not the same as it was” could encapsulate any number of professional, economic, or psychological positions the average listener might find themselves in at present. Heck, Styles’ own tour for that album was postponed two years. With these lines, he’s addressing everyone about everything.

The concurrently-released music video furthers the ‘80s association—largely in the primary-colored jumpsuits worn by Styles and his dance partner. The two alternately trade moves on a rotating stage that evokes a turntable and roll away from each other atop a set of sliding platforms that, splattered with color, evoke canvases. The repetitive motion, the indirect and inconvenient angles of their bodies, the way their hands barely miss contact, all drive home Styles’ beloved themes of communication breakdown, crossroads, standstill. Some arresting images result.

For the entire project, Styles surrounded himself with collaborators he knew and trusted: co-writers Tyler Johnson and Kid Harpoon contributed writing and production to his first two albums; and video director Tanu Muino had worked with Cardi B and Normani, among others. The central lyric took on a new shape and substance to Muino in real time as her home country of Ukraine was invaded by Russian forces shortly after filming began. Styles has been open about what a necessarily emotional process songwriting is for him (hence his reluctance to work with detached session writers), so the added passion of the circumstances only strengthened the creative team’s bond and did the project good.

“As It Was” has been called different from anything Harry Styles has done before, but this reviewer would beg to disagree— the driving pulses and disco-inspired turns of Fine Line (“Golden” and “Adore You,” respectively) arguably pointed toward, and prepared him for, this next move. The question we thankfully won’t have to wait too long to have answered is how else his third full-length effort has pushed and challenged and molded him. Whatever the final product, we already know it’s Harry’s house and we’re just living in it.