The song eventually bursts into a triumphant but extra-melancholy horn riff, reminiscent of this earthy and towering 2011 BI jam, that throws off the time signature and pulls various angelic voices, Harry’s and others’, into its mighty vortex, like an emotional whirlpool, like a gargantuan stylistic blender. “Fine Line” is a feast of exquisite melancholy with quick spikes of sensuality: “Spreading you open / Is the only way of knowing you,” Styles observes forlornly over rising piano and bass as the electronic frippery of current Bon Iver swells alongside him. “Put a price on emotion / I’m looking for somethin’ to buy,” moans Styles in a shaggy falsetto over spare acoustic guitar as the song begins, the burly beard and ice-crusted hunting cabin of Bon Iver’s career-making 2007 debut For Emma, Forever Ago all but visible. Which is to say that the closer and title track to Fine Line, Styles’s second solo album since One Direction’s increasingly indefinite 2016 hiatus, is a lovelorn arena-folk power ballad about two beautiful people failing to find much common ground, while in the background, rockism and popism (not to mention the seemingly disparate years 1979, 1989, 2009, and 2019) find quite a lot of it. Which is to say it’s a young, liberated English boy band veteran taking solace, if not quite finding liberation, in scruffy 21st-century American indie rock that already sounds several decades older than it (or he) actually is. The best song on the new Harry Styles record sounds like multiple phases of Bon Iver colliding in midair.
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