Harry Styles Drops First Solo Album: Do Critics and Fans Approve?

The 10-track record -- which was promoted with residency on James Corden's "Late Late Show," a Rolling Stone interview and a music video -- includes a mish-mash of psychedelia, Britpop and balladry.

Many critics were particularly attracted to the album since it was produced by Jeff Bhasker, who also worked with artists such as Beyoncé, Kanye West and Bruno Mars. Styles collaboration with the super producer didn't disappoint, either.

Here is what the critics are saying.

Rolling Stone:

“Harry's soft-rock fetish won't surprise fans of One Direction gems like 'Olivia' or 'Stockholm Syndrome', but this is the first time we've heard Sweet Baby Styles run with it for a whole album.”

“The songs he tipped in advance didn't play coy about his old-school inspirations – the Badfinger hook of 'Ever Since New York', the 'Blackbird' guitar of 'Sweet Creature', the way 'Sign of the Times' tweaks Queen and Bowie in candelabra mode – yet they all sound like him, playful and tender in equal measure.”

Variety

“If [the album] was a colour, it would be the baby blue of Jimi Hendrix's Fender Stratocaster or the soft pink of Mick Jagger's suit when he performed on “Top Of The Pops” in 1971. It's rock and it's roll, but it's also soft and sensitive...”

“Unlike Robbie Williams and Justin Timberlake before him, there's a deepened millennial sensibility to being a leading man. Harry is a sensitive soul; A post-Drake phenomenon; A serious pop performer with enviable vocal chops and a gifted ability to convey a song's emotional heft. He oozes class, ease and a sense of import without thrusting forth from the hips, or wreaking of a self-satisfied sense of boyband emancipation. Both respectful of his past and nervous for his future, “Harry Styles,” the album, looks both ways.”

Vanity Fair

“The way that Styles and his producers… have assembled such a wide array of throwback music references, from 20, 30, 40 years ago, gives the album an air of precociousness that only highlights the youth of its front man.”

“Granted, a precocious kid who wants to sound like Stevie and Elton and Syd and Lindsey and Liam and Noel and all the rest is a precocious kid with good taste, a precocious kid I wanna know. But it's still pastiche, still a really well put-together school project. On 'Harry Styles', Harry Styles shows he isn't quite grown-up just yet.”

“There's more than thwarted love out there in the world for a young man to explore. 'Harry Styles' the album gives us modest hope that Harry Styles the artist will find all that too, someday. And, more important, make it his own.”

The Independent

“There's been far too much pressure on the 23-year-old to establish himself as 'the new Bowie' or 'the new Mick Jagger' (as if there could ever be such a thing), but what is immediately clear is that those two artists, among many others, have played a huge influence on the record.”

“Styles has opened himself up, as best he can, to his audience, and by gathering a solid team around him to help achieve that he's created an immersive, well-produced collection of songs that isn't trying to prove anything in particular to anyone.”

“And when you have that many people talking about you, that many column inches and gossip writers try to dissect your life like a school science project… that's quite a feat for a debut album.”

The Guardian

“Not all the album's musical homages work: Styles is desperately ill-equipped for the rock'n'roll raunch of 'Only Angel' and the glammy 'Kiwi'. Alas, his voice sounds no more like Rod Stewart than it does Rod Hull, while the lyrics are a torrent of hoary pub-band cliches that suggest his heart isn't really in it…”

“Others, however, are really enjoyable: 'Carolina' sets a guitar part borrowed from Stealers Wheel's 'Stuck in the Middle With You' against a wall-eyed, Beck-like vocal and seasick strings; 'Woman', meanwhile, melds its 'Bennie And The Jets' piano and 'Crocodile Rock' backing vocals to a gauzy, echo-drenched, faintly psychedelic sound filled with retorts of fretless bass to brilliant effect.”

Here's what his fans are saying: