Taste Back

Pop songs about exes usually come in two varieties: the furious "never speak to me again" kind and the misty "we were young and foolish but lovely" kind. Harry Styles tries something more psychologically complicated on "Taste Back," a song about that awkward situation in which someone from your past wanders back into your life.

The song appears as track 6 on Styles' fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., positioned roughly at the hinge between the more danceable, outward-facing opening and the more reflective second half. Its cooler, more guarded emotional temperature acts as a counterpoint to the warmer "Coming Up Roses" two tracks later.

At the heart of the song is a deceptively simple question: Did you get your taste back? Or do you just need a little love? The word "taste" functions on multiple levels: taste as discernment, taste as desire, taste as the capacity to recognize something good when you have it. There is a mildly teasing, gently sarcastic undertone; the suggestion being that the ex left (or behaved badly) precisely because they had lost their taste, and Styles is now asking, with wry skepticism, whether they've recovered it, or whether they're simply lonely.