Harry Styles is one of today’s most incredibly influential pop stars. Harry’s House, released on May 20, is his third solo album. It sold 520,000 copies in its first week, the highest of the year so far. Amazing sales performance is usually attributed a dedicated fanbase, but the album also racked up a healthy 250 million streams. Other than genres where streaming is the principal means of listening, like R&B, hip hop and Latin, this was the highest number of streams of any album this year. The single “As It Was” went to number one on the Hot 100 and the Global 200 six separate times and nine separate times, respectively.

“As It Was” saw a release in late March, just ahead of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival the following month. It’s no surprise how popular the song became following the runaway success that his late 2019 album, Fine Line, experienced in parallel with the pandemic. Fine Line spawned seven singles, and one of them in particular—“Watermelon Sugar”—became a symbol of the summer of 2020, helping bring in more than 700,000 concertgoers to his US tour the following fall. Love him or leave him, Styles’ headline performance at Coachella became the most hotly anticipated of the festival.

One Direction was never the type of boy band to put on elaborate performances, but even within their laid-back shows, Styles had the stage presence of a rock singer. Even within their teenage boy band style, echoes of the classic pop/rock of the 1970s could be heard. While this may be typical of most British artists, Styles is rather a unique case among his former bandmates and their solo efforts. Fans weren’t too taken aback, then, with the soft rock/ballad sound of his first solo song, “Sign of the Times.” But there was nothing unexpected about his pivot to punk/synth with Harry’s House given the enormous success of “Watermelon Sugar.” There’s no reason an artist with a taste for 1970s music has to stick to one path or the other because modern pop singers have the privilege of choice. The varied genres Styles plays around with make his songs that much richer and more colorful.

Moreover, his style shines bright, and has come to be one of his defining traits since the Met Gala 2019. His fashion sense is so much more than his feather boa, too, combining British tailoring with gender fluidity to create a contemporary take on glam. The pink coat and gold spangled jumpsuit he wore on the Coachella stage brought him to the level of Lil Nas X and Lady Gaga.

It’s interesting the way his music and fashion share something in common: They’re all about fun, and hardly controversial, yet there’s nothing light or superficial about them. Rather, they’re classic and artistic. Styles meant to deepen this part of him further with his solo career, and his performance at Coachella packaged this all up nicely, capturing a complete portrait of the artist to the present day. Sometimes one show can perfectly encapsulate an artist, and the energy of Styles’ performance at Coachella is still alive and well into the early days of summer, keeping “As It Was” around the top of the charts. This is the type of success that good preparation can bring you.