Harry Styles, 25, and French model Camille Rowe, 33, split in 2018, and from the sounds of his new album, he still hasn’t completely gotten over it. Harry’s heartbreak is all over Fine Line, released on Dec. 13, and one song seems to be explicitly about the French model. “I just miss your accent and your friends,” Harry sings on “Cherry,” before adding “Did you know I still talk to them?” While he doesn’t specifically call out Camille by name, it becomes apparent he’s talking about her accent – when Camille starts speaking French on the song! “Coucou! Tu dors? Oh, j’suis désolé… Bah non… Nan c’est pas marrant,” she says, according to Genius (which translates to “Hello! Are you asleep? Oh, I’m sorry…Well, no… It’s not funny”).
We even see a jealous side to the One Direction alum! “Don’t you call him ‘baby’ / We’re not talking lately / Don’t you call him what you used to call me,” Harry croons on the bittersweet track. His vulnerability paid off, because “Camille” started trending on Twitter soon after Harry’s new album dropped. “Ok i was not aware that camille broke harry like that #fineline,” one listener tweeted, and another wrote, “I’m fu**ing crying this is Heartbreaking I feel like I broke up with Camille Rowe and I’m feeling it thru his damn voice my fucking MANS.” Surprise, surprise — even Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor can get his heart broken.
Harry revealed that “Cherry” was about an ex when speaking to Zane Lowe of Apple Music’s Beats 1. “I wanted it to be true to the moment that I wrote it, and how I was feeling then [which was] not great,” he said, according to Billboard. “It’s so pathetic in a way. The night that I wrote it, I was saying that I was feeling a lot of pressure because the last record wasn’t a radio record. And I was like, ‘I feel like this record has to be really big. So I feel like I need to make certain songs.’ And Tyler [Johnson, producer] just said to me, ‘You just have to make the record that you want to make right now.’ So then we stayed up and wrote ‘Cherry’ that night.”
He also confirmed that it was an “ex-girlfriend” at the end of the song. “We’re friends and stuff, so I asked her if it was okay. I think she liked it,” he said, without specifying which ex-girlfriend it was, but Metro reported that the voice speaks French, so it’s easy to put two and two together.
Fine Line is “all about having sex and feeling sad,” Harry told Rolling Stone in the in-depth profile about his sophomore release. The article also hinted at just how much the album was influenced by his split from Camille. “He went through this breakup that had a big impact on him,” Tom Hull, one of Harry’s “closest collaborators” and best friends, told Rolling Stone. “He had a whole emotional journey about her, this whole relationship. But I kept saying, ‘The best way of dealing with it is to put it in these songs you’re writing.’”
Harry, not one to kiss and tell, admitted that the songs on Fine Line are coming from personal heartbreak, but he didn’t name his ex-girlfriend in that interview. “It’s not like I’ve ever sat and done an interview and said, ‘So I was in a relationship, and this is what happened,’” he said. “Because, for me, music is where I let that cross over. It’s the only place, strangely, where it feels right to let that cross over.” Though this quote led some to wonder if Harry would discuss his romance with Taylor Swift on the record, it wasn’t the case. After all, Harry and Taylor haven’t been together for nearly seven years, and it both have had their hearts broken by others since then.
