In August 2022, Harry Styles kicked off a sold-out 15-night residency at Madison Square Garden so notable that it earned him a permanent banner in the rafters.
On Wednesday night, the former boy band star, occasional actor and full-time pop juggernaut returned to the venue for the first of a 30-show run that continues through the end of October. It’s hard to quantify what else might have doubled in Styles’s career since he last appeared there, though the volume of screams when he took the stage just before 9 p.m. did seem to exceed most known units of measurement.
The makeup of the crowd tipped toward giddy young women, in packs or in pairs. Feather boas and hand-held bubble machines dotted the stands, and sequins were strongly represented. The mood before the show began was slightly delirious: Many of the 20,000 or so attendees had traveled considerable distances — New York is the only North American stop on Styles’s “Together, Together” world tour — and some had begun lining up in the early hours of the day for priority admission.
As the evening kicked off, a dynamic, bass-heavy opening set by the British music producer and D.J. Jamie xx temporarily captured the attention of an impatient crowd, or at least helped it burn off some anticipatory energy. He was still playing when Styles’s band and dancers began filtering onto the stage, a large oval with a raised platform across its center onto which an assortment of notebook-doodle images — flowers, scribbles, dice — were projected throughout the night.
Styles, in a polka-dot shirt and tie and a sharply tailored white dinner jacket, strode out and launched directly into “Dance No More,” a squiggly light-funk number from his recent fourth solo album, “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” (The singer has attributed its sound to a new affinity for dance music inspired in part by the American dance-punk outfit LCD Soundsystem and time spent at the Berlin nightclub Berghain.)
Flanked by two female dancers, Styles greeted the crowd briefly, playing shamelessly to the locals (“How about them Knicks, huh?”) before strapping on a guitar for “Carolina,” a retro rock jangler from his self-titled 2017 solo debut and then moving into the slinky, absurdist 2022 single “Music for a Sushi Restaurant.”
A more expansive greeting followed, including a story about Styles’s first time playing the Garden as a teenager in the enormously successful boy band One Direction and how he had been so excited to be there that when he walked in, he kissed the floor. “Well, since then we’ve learned a lot about germs,” he said, before returning to more earnest expressions of gratitude.
Throughout the night, hits from across Styles’s catalog — the airy mid-tempo anthem “Adore You,” the early-career acoustic ballad “Sweet Creature” and “Watermelon Sugar,” an ode to female pleasure — seemed to arrive seamlessly and almost casually. Styles is a fluid, loose-limbed dancer and an elastic singer with a showman’s instinctual charm that mostly conceals effort. Even when high-kicking across the stage during “Kiwi,” he rarely appeared to sweat.
The larger job of being Harry Styles onstage is, perhaps, emotional labor. His way of speaking evokes some combination of best friend, enthusiastic-feminist boyfriend and cool therapist, his public demeanor consistently sincere and sunny, impish but affirming. Near the end of the night, he spoke at length about his appreciation for the fans and the community they have created. (He also broke off midsentence to point to a woman high up in the stands and ask, “Are you very pregnant? With the disco ball belly? You’re glowing.” She was, in fact.)
Styles has also developed a reputation for appreciating older female artists — a “Respect Your Mother” T-shirt appeared to be one of the more popular selections at the show’s merch stands. So just a day after Dolly Parton’s death, it might have felt remiss for him not to acknowledge the loss. He did so by making a declaration of love and cuing up Parton’s original recording of “I Will Always Love You,” which concertgoers waved their smartphone lights to until the song cut off somewhat abruptly as the band segued into a final encore of “Sign of the Times” and “Aperture,” two significant bookends from his solo career.
The crowd screamed once more as Styles took a final bow and lapped the stage, waving and blowing kisses before slipping through an exit. He would be back to do it again in two nights, and then every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday through October after that.
