The first time Harry Styles wanted to signal that his comeback was imminent, in 2019, he plastered cities around the world with posters that asked, “Do you know who you are?” There was a website, too, that auto-generated answers for those who weren’t too sure. You would enter your name, and it would tell you that you are kind, golden, a fine line. Sometimes it would tell you, “You are distanced, but not far from my heart.” Each message was signed, “Love, H.”
Last February, DoYouKnowWhoYouAre.com went dark. After five years, the vault of positive affirmations that had introduced Fine Line reverted to a blank screen. It was the end of an era, but also, fans hoped, the beginning of a new one.
They’ve learned to associate cryptic, minimalistic websites with new album cycles. In 2022, YouAreHome.Co preceded Harry’s House. That site featured a door that opened up to different images: grapes, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Earth. Most of it didn’t make any sense in the moment. Some of it still doesn’t. That website is still live, though the door is locked and the once-vibrant interface is dull and gray. It’s nothing like the sea of bodies dancing beneath glimmering lights on WeBelongTogether.Co.
Keeping with tradition, the website that many fans believe must be teasing Styles’ fourth album launched at the same time as “We Belong Together” posters appeared in major cities worldwide. The location on New York’s Lower East Side saw an influx of fans visiting to take photos on Monday, Jan. 12. Some lingered there for a while to take down any advertisements that were plastered over it. The website URL appears in a circular format on the poster, and there’s also an additional note printed in the shape of a square that differs from city to city.
In New York, the poster teases, “See you very soon.” The one in Palermo reads, “It’s all there waiting.” Another, this time in Berlin, says, “Let the light in.” In São Paulo, the poster reads, “A Gente Se Vê Em Breve,” or “We’ll see each other soon.”
Just ahead of the new year, Styles reminisced about the last time he was in a room full of his fans. The musician quietly uploaded “Forever, Forever,” a nine-minute extended edition of the three-minute video he shared at the end of Love on Tour in 2023. Both videos overlay footage of heartfelt moments between fans with the piano ballad he composed for the final night of the 169-show run. “To the most inspiring people I know,” Styles captioned the original video. In footage from the final show, he addressed the crowd. “None of you are alone,” he said. “I feel what it is that you create together. This show is what it is because of all of you. You’ve changed my life. Thank you so so much.”
The fans featured in the clips could already feel the weight of his absence. “Some sadness because it is the last show,” a fan says in the clip. “Then he will disappear.” Another adds, “We won’t see him dancing on stages anymore.”
They weren’t the only ones feeling the gravity of saying goodbye, even if only for a little while. “It’s been the greatest experience of my entire life,” Styles wrote in a rare Instagram Story post. “I feel so incredibly full and happy. It’s all because of you. You have given me memories that will last a lifetime, more than I could have ever dreamed of. Thank you for your time, your energy, and your love. It’s been an honor to play for you. I hope you had as much fun as I did. Look after each other, I’ll see you again when the time is right. Treat People With Kindness. I love you more than you’ll ever know.”
Now, it seems, the time is right once again. The time since Styles released Harry’s House — 1,334 days and counting — is the longest he’s ever gone without sharing new music. “Harries, the war might be over,” one fan wrote on X. “Going through this worse hrought together, clowning over every little thing, waiting for 3 years for him to come back now, it’s all paying off.” (“Hrought,” of course, is a fan term combining the words “Harry” and “drought.”)
The clowning isn’t over just yet, though. Styles still hasn’t officially announced anything. For fans of an artist with essentially no active social media presence, it remains a waiting game. To some extent, that’s what accounts for so much of the exhilarated anticipation around his return. Styles doesn’t check in often, if at all. In the time he’s been away, fans fed on crumbs: grainy images of the musician riding around London on a Lime bike, running marathons in Tokyo and Berlin, or apparently awaiting the announcement of the new pope at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
“When I’m working, I work really hard, and I think I’m really professional. Then when I’m not, I’m not,” Styles told Rolling Stone in 2022. “I’d like to think I’m open, and probably quite stubborn, too, and willing to be vulnerable…. I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively. There’s always going to be a version of a narrative, and I think I just decided I wasn’t going to spend the time trying to correct it or redirect it in some way.”
In 2022, Styles’ close collaborator Kid Harpoon told Rolling Stone he was looking forward to following up Harry’s House. “What I hope for going forward with Harry is that whatever it is next, let’s not try and second-guess it, or do anything based on what we’ve done before,” he said. “Let’s just try and do something new and land somewhere exciting. And hopefully everyone’s as excited to hear it as we are to kind of hear it as well. You know, I feel like we don’t know what it is yet. That could be anything, which is the most exciting thing about it.”
