You don’t have to be a mind reader to get the sexy vibe Harry Styles is putting out with his hit 2019 song “Watermelon Sugar.” Fans and critics speculated from its initial release that its lyrics about the sweetness of fruit, such as “Tastes like strawberries/On a summer evenin’/And it sounds just like a song/I want your belly/And that summer feelin’/I don’t know if I could ever go without,” were actually a metaphor for oral pleasure. How else to interpret Styles singing, “Breathe me in, breathe me out/I don’t know if I could ever go without?”
In a 2019 review of the album at Slant, critic Anna Richmond wrote, “Taste and touch are central to the hyper-sensual ‘Watermelon Sugar,’ in which Styles describes a sexual encounter in terms of sweet fruits and summer nights, building to an ecstatic, horn-filled climax.”
Styles finally confirmed that the song is about the female orgasm at a recent concert, but the May 2020 video, which opens with text reading “This video is about touching,” also makes his meaning unquestionably clear. As Styles sings lines like “I just wanna taste it, I just wanna taste it,” he’s either suggestively eating watermelon, surrounded by women eating watermelon, feeding him watermelon, kissing him and writhing around indulgently. There are even articles decoding exploring every sexually explicit nuance of the suggestive video and its relationship to oral sex.
Styles said in his NPR Tiny Desk Concert that he wrote the song in 2017, after seeing a copy of Richard Brautigan’s book In Watermelon Sugar while in a Nashville studio during a tour, and being inspired by the phrase. He went on to say that the song is about “that initial…euphoria of when you start seeing someone or you start sleeping with someone or just like being around someone and you have that kind of excitement about them.”