Why Harry Styles Just Scored His First No. 1 Song

Late summer is a great time for sleeper hits: songs that have been hanging around the charts for months and finally hit their stride. This year’s sleeper hit is “Watermelon Sugar,” a wisp of a song by boy bander–turned–self-styled rock star Harry Styles. “Watermelon Sugar” is the third single promoted from Styles’ second solo album Fine Line, which was released last December. The Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync had the top-selling albums of 1999 and 2000, respectively—the diamond-selling Millennium and No Strings Attached—but only scored a solitary Hot 100 topper between them, ’N Sync’s “It’s Gonna Be Me.” This radio bias against boy bands has persisted into the 21st century. The chorus consists of nothing more than the line “Watermelon sugar high” repeated a half-dozen or more times, with emphasis on the “HIGH.” Last November, when Styles did double-duty hosting and singing on Saturday Night Live, “Sugar” was one of the songs he performed, and in that indoor setting, it came off as willfully quirky and seasonally incongruous; the song’s first verse line is “Tastes like strawberries on a summer evenin’.” Now, timed for 2020’s beach season—complete with a video filled with beautiful people on the shore, shot just before the pandemic and, according to a title card, “dedicated to touching”—it’s sitting atop the hit parade.