Like many groups to come out of X Factor, One Direction were assembled from would-be solo artists; despite their harmonies, scripted lad camaraderie, and terrifying sales numbers, the band was always a holding pattern until the boys could return to their solo careers. Zayn Malik, after an acrimonious departure, took the traditional ex-boybander route: getting the best R&B beats money can buy, escaping the band’s pent-up songwriting to relive his past couple years of getting very laid, and being rewarded with radio airplay. Liam Payne, with a Migos collaborations in the works, is angling to join him. Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson have embarked upon the twin British traditions of becoming a busker with a budget and guesting on an EDM song.

And Harry Styles, as you may have heard, is attempting to be a rock star. Of course it sounds ridiculous; no matter what music they release, with what sugar content, everyone in One Direction may forever remain frozen in the public imagination as moppets with rumpled hair, bubblegum songs a large singularity of preteen fans. And yet someone’s got to manage it, or else we’d have no Beatles, no Michael, no anybody without a perfectly scuzzy, organic past. Every teen idol sounds ridiculous proclaiming their maturity, until they don’t.

Oddly enough, of the five One Directioners, Styles new solo output strays the least from the music the group actually made. So strong is the pejorative of being a boy band that the group progressed from power-pop takes on the Backstreet Boys to full-on, and often-great, Journey and The Who rips with hardly any ado; he was prepping for this moment, if not from the beginning, then at least since he took “Faithfully” to the desert in a leopard coat. But Styles, of course, would rather not be known for carrying on the One Direction sound. Where Zayn spent the months before his album telling the world he has sex, Harry’s run his own yearlong campaign insisting he has cred, culminating in enormous documentary profiles by Paul McCartney and Almost Famous’s Cameron Crowe. “I didn’t want to put out my first album and be like, ‘He’s tried to re-create the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties,” Styles told Crowe. “I wanted to do something that sounds like me.”

Read Katherine St. Asaph’s full review here.