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It's only May, but Harry Styles has already given us the kind of free-flowing, ugly sobs we usually only expect around the annual John Lewis Christmas advert drop. The subject of his latest video? A very lonely hoover.
Not since Pixar invented a new scale of cuteness aggression with 2008's WALL-E has a tiny robot elicited as much emotion as the protagonist in the video for his Harry's House album track “Satellite”. A fan favourite from the record, when teasers started dropping of a music video coming our way, many noted that the tiny Roomba-esque hoover at the centre of its tale looked like the one used at the end of Harry Styles concerts to pick up discarded glitter and feather boas. Tag yourself, we're the lonely, workhorse vacuum cleaner looking to the skies for something bigger and better.
For ease, let's call this fella HARR-E. HARR-E is busy cleaning up backstage, as he does, when he watches a news report on the other big heart-crushingly lonely robot in the cosmos, the Mars curiosity. Seeing his fellow machine in space, he envisions something bigger than just eating up plastic feathers. He sneaks on stage to watch Harry Styles perform before being thrown into the rubbish. No bother, he breaks free, taking to the streets on a kind of Forrest Gump running mission to nowhere. He zooms along, little flashlights for eyes evoking the kind of curious personality reserved for animated baby animals. He crosses the US, zipping from LA to Las Vegas, through snow, rain and wind, all the way to Florida, where his journey ends in the fields surrounding the Kennedy Space Centre.
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There, as his battery runs out, he lies in a field with Harry Styles, looking up at the stars. His mission to find life beyond the arena floors is complete. Then he dies, happy in the field next to NASA.
As a song, “Satellite” imagines watching a loved one from afar, waiting for the call from them to let you in. Never, in the history of love songs, have the jagged, cold edges of a vacuum cleaner been more clearly transformed into something quite so heartbreaking. He's just a little guy, and aren't we all.
