We’ve known the power of Harry Styles for a very long time. He is undeniably talented and so likeable. His most recent gift to us has been the music video for his single “Golden” , released on Oct. 26th, 2020.
Harry Styles is known to release very little about his music videos. The man doesn’t even announce he’s going to be making one. There is little communication about his upcoming videos until very close to their release. This creates so much excitement around the videos and fans are kept in suspense, often until 24 hours before the video release.
With many of his music videos, Styles has released teasers. With “Golden”, Styles released a 15-second teaser on Oct. 25th, which played the first 15 seconds of the song over a clip of him running towards the camera. The teaser ended with “GOLDEN” written across the screen in his signature bold, yellow font followed by “OCT 26.” The teaser very quickly gained over one million views and is currently sitting at over 4.7 million views, ten days after its upload.
With four of his five singles off of “Fine Line” , his second studio album which was released in December 2019, Styles created promotional websites. Often, the website domain was titled after one of the lyrics from the song. For example, the “Watermelon Sugar” website domain was ijustwannatasteit.com and his website for “Golden” was youaresogolden.com. In these two cases, the websites were interactive, allowing visitors to fill in their name and get a postcard with a note instantly from the man himself. The website created for “Adore You” was especially unique as it was hosted as a travel site for “Eroda”, a fictional destination created purely for the video, and “adore” spelt backwards.
The video for “Golden” premiered at 12 p.m. EST on Monday, Oct. 26th, 2020, and began with a countdown starting at one minute and 45 seconds. This was likely to allow the video to buffer while being viewed by hundreds of thousands of people at once, but added even more suspense and excitement. The video, in all its glory, played after the countdown. By the end of the premiere, there had been over one million live viewers.
After the live premiere of the music video, an Instagram post and tweet were made on Styles’ accounts stating the music video was out, both of which received one million likes that day, with the Instagram post currently nearing seven million likes.
It wouldn’t even be an exaggeration to say Styles has the world wrapped around his finger, and I’d say deservingly so.