Harry Styles Turns a Failed Christmas Song Into 'Coming Up Roses'

Harry Styles has released the music video for "Coming Up Roses," the fourth single from his album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, and it finds him waltzing through a love gone awry. The clip premiered as the singer closes a 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden this week, with a final Wednesday show and two back-to-back Halloween concerts on Friday and Saturday.

The video does not moralize about romance. Styles instead leads a room of hopeful and hopeless romantics through the steps of a waltz — step forward with the left, sideways with the right, bring them together, reverse and repeat. The choreography carries a ballad about a relationship's impermanence.

Where does the song sit in Styles' catalogue?

"Coming Up Roses" follows three earlier singles from the fourth studio album, which Styles shared in March:

• "Aperture," built on Jersey club rhythms
• "American Girls," a slice of classic pop
• "Dance No More," described as sweat-drenched

The ballad began, improbably, as a Christmas song. Styles told Zane Lowe earlier this year that the seasonal attempt collapsed almost immediately. "That lasted two lines," he said. "I started it and then it kind of just wrote itself and I was like, oh, this has nothing to do with Christmas. For me, it is a love song about how special something can be, and not everything has to last forever in order for it to be special."

That last line has become the song's unstated thesis, and its irony is already playing out in the audience.

What does the album tell us about where Styles is now?

Styles laid out his thinking on the record in a conversation with Thom Yorke for Rolling Stone's Musicians on Musicians series. "I think it was just where I felt like I was at in my life, and the music that I was experiencing," he said. "I wanted to meld the parts of my life together. I'd started going out dancing a lot more. I really didn't want it to be like, 'Oh, I'm listening to this music — this is where I'm at,' but then I go in the studio and say, 'Well, I have to make this sort of music instead.'"

The result is an album that refuses to separate the dance floor from the studio, and "Coming Up Roses" is its most tender proof.

Why are fans getting engaged to a song about impermanence?

The ballad's message — that love need not last forever to matter — has not stopped couples from proposing during Styles' 30-night Madison Square Garden run. Fans have gotten engaged to "Coming Up Roses" across the residency, a phenomenon the singer has reportedly found perplexing given the song's subject.

The engagement trend says something about how audiences receive the song: not as a lament but as a celebration of love's intensity in the present tense. As Styles' Garden residency ends this week with its Halloween finale, "Coming Up Roses" stands as the album's emotional centerpiece — a waltz written for whatever the moment holds, however briefly.