Nine-point-eight metres per second per second…
[Video]
[5.29]
Alfred Soto: Every generation coming of age after 2007 gets the “Apologize” it deserves.
[3]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A compelling experiment in whether I’ll like a Lewis Capaldi song any better if it’s mislabeled as a Harry Styles song.
[3]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: On its surface, “Falling” sounds like another banal Lewis Capaldi piano ballad du jour. But hiding underneath is a surprising amount of depth, reflection about regret, self-loathing, and harm that you’ve done to someone else. “What if I’m someone I don’t want around?” Harry asks, “What if I’m someone you won’t talk about?” The questions are never answered — they just linger uncomfortably, leaning into introspection rather than running away from it. It feels vulnerable and authentic, like something that could only belong to Harry Styles.
[6]
Tobi Tella: Maybe overwrought and melodramatic, but it’s never less than honest. The brevity and simplicity of the lyrics helps it hurt more; “what if I’m someone I don’t want around?” is a pretty devastating statement of loathing rather than the generic sad platitudes that have become synonymous with the piano ballad. Stars: they self-hate just like us!
[7]
Alex Clifton: It’s simple, pretty, honest and earnest — also a bit overdone, but it’s nice to hear some self-reflection from Styles that, err, some former bandmates never tried to emulate. It’s also a dull single from Styles. “Adore You” deserved a much better follow up — although, to be fair, “Adore You” is peak-Fine Line perfection, so anything that came after would be weak in comparison.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: Oh, gimlet-eyed Harry, his shredding is earnest and delicious. He wears self-pity like a cloak, and it fits him like Lycra. He is lovely and he knows it. But then he wrote that chorus, which, apropos of the title, is as banal and clichéd as an Alicia Keys song (that means very). It is also very, very bad and the over-emoting is painful to listen to. I’m not sure why anyone would torpedo such a promising, on-brand ballad with such horrible impersonal gloop, but perhaps like his beloved watermelon, Harry Styles just doesn’t have much flavour taste.
[4]
Michael Hong: The world is aflame, and where do you seek refuge? The fast-paced pop-music that makes you feel like the world will end if the beat stops? The casual nihilism of Grimes? Or do you turn to the quiet solitude of Harry Styles, the kind of balladry specifically manufactured to tug at your heart? When faced with the reality that the only way to survive is social distancing, capital Pop music only feels like a temporary escape. And Grimes’ nihilism feels pointed, like a sarcastic joke that you were never part of. Instead, there’s some sort of consolation in “Falling,” a reminder that everyone else is going through the exact same quiet solitude, a disconnect with reality that can only be felt through the pain in Styles’s voice. The concept might be different, but the feeling’s the same. Styles doesn’t look for an escape but confronts it head-on. Each question hangs with a sort of lingering grace but the questions all have one thing in common in that they can’t really be answered. Like the best of these questions, the best approximation of an answer is an emotion, here, an intense gut-wrenching, sinking, loneliness that, paradoxically, reminds you that the feeling is shared between others. For me, the lack of an answer only adds to that comfort.
[9]