Listening to erstwhile One Direction heartthrob turned soulful solo act Harry Styles croon and plaint and moan on his debut album, Harry Styles, one hears the murmur of many lives lived. The album—consisting of ten richly produced, heavily referential tracks—is awash in world-weary melancholy, an acute heartbreak dulled by a fond wistfulness. Oh, how many stories Harry Styles has to tell, how many blurry, meaningful nights lie in his past. Harry Styles sweeps you up in its sense of knowing, of wisdom, of age. Its mix of space rock and Fleetwood Mac and Sunset Strip scuzz and Brit-pop nostalgia telegraphs a depth, a considered weight. The album has an undeniable undertow.

But then you remember that, wait a second, Harry Styles is only 23. How long and strange could his trip really have been? Of course, a kid grows old fast when he gets famous as a teenager, as part of one of the biggest boy-band acts in history. He travels the world, he meets many young women, he perhaps loves and lusts and whatever else in a more extreme fashion than most regular late-adolescents. But still, Harry Styles is so steeped in a sense of history, in a yearning for the old days, that it’s hard not to see some of it—half of it?—as a put-on, as Harry Styles trying on some vintage clothes and strutting around in them, rather than really wearing them. Harry Styles, while a good and satisfying and occasionally affecting listen, has a sheen of youthful inauthenticity to it, a tinny hum of shallowness cutting through even the album’s grander moments.

By now I’m going to assume we’ve all heard the album’s first single, the Bowie/Oasis homage “Sign of the Times,” on which Styles shows off his new soaring rock vocals. (Which he was able to land on Graham Norton but wasn’t quite able to on Saturday Night Live. It’s a curious choice for a first single, a nearly six-minute epic with lyrics like, “You can’t bribe the door on your way to the sky,” that is supposedly about a dead friend. “Sign of the Times” is not the sexy pop gush of former bandmate Zayn Malik’s new music, nor the homey guitar-and-sweetness of Niall Horan’s first single. (Niall is now making sexy music too.) Still, “Sign of the Times” has an arresting sweep to it, especially as Styles crescendos toward the final big notes, retroactively imbuing the song’s muddled lyrics with heft and importance. For what it’s worth, the song is a fair, honest representation of the larger album, which is perhaps the job of a first single.

You may also have heard Styles perform “Ever Since New York” on Saturday Night Live or the Today show. It’s a song that is, in an odd way, reminiscent of Melissa Etheridge’s “I Take You With Me,” from the Boys on the Side soundtrack. (Kids, consult your local library to find out what Boys on the Side is.) “Ever Since New York” has the same sense of motion, of barreling down the road. Though, unlike Etheridge, Styles is singing about what’s in the rearview, not whatever’s on the horizon. He’s yearning for a moment with someone, grabbing at a memory when he sings, “I've been praying, I never did before / Understand I'm talking to the walls / And I've been praying ever since New York,” before launching into the beery, Fleetwood-flecked chorus, pleading with someone to tell him something “I don’t already know.” There’s that wistfulness, that weary ache, strange but effective coming from a 23-year-old.

Listening to the album at the Sony Music offices in New York, in a small room fittingly decorated with a rock-‘n’-roll-red carpet and a deep-crimson wall, I found myself wanting to know who, exactly, broke Harry’s heart. That's what most of the album seems to be about, in some sense or another. The album—which even features a slow jam called simply “Woman,” thudding with notes of Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets” and Pulp’s “This Is Hardcore”—is very much concerned with one woman or various women whom Styles has loved in some capacity. At the top of my scrawl of notes, I wrote in big letters: “Romance,” “Lost love,” and “Sex.” They are easily the three defining themes of Harry Styles. (And, perhaps, of Harry Styles.)

It’s quite-on-the-nose in “Woman,” which finds Harry playing the jealous lover. “I hope you can see the shape I’ve been in / When he’s touching your skin,” he growls. There’s anger, sure, but he’s still sensitive, wounded Harry. He’s the one pining, self-deprecating. “I’m empty I know,” he sings, a bleak statement that echoes track 5, “Two Ghosts,” a pleasant folk-rock ballad in which Harry keens, in a sweet voice perhaps more familiar to One Direction fans, “We’re just two ghosts swimming in a glass half empty / Trying to remember how it feels to have a heartbeat.” Styles is empty, his heart has stopped beating, he’s a wreck. Or was a wreck? There isn’t really a sense of presence to the album. It all feels recalled from a somewhat safe remove, a looking back on tumultuousness, reading the old diary and remembering a messy, but beautiful, time.

A sex-filled time, too! On songs like the Beck-meets-“Stuck in the Middle with You” barnstormer “Carolina,” and the big-guitar Viper Room thrasher “Kiwi,” Styles sings about how “She feels so good” and evokes “Hard candy dripping on me till my feet are wet.” One could see this as yet another example of that old post-boy band classic, the public announcement that a previously chaste-seeming, non-threatening boy is now a fully actualized sexual being. We’ve heard it many times before, including from Zayn Malik and Niall Horan. I think these songs partly function that way for Styles. But, as with everything else on the album, all that sex is laced with sadness, a regret and a loss. Again: I really want to know who did this to our boy. (A line in “Kiwi”—“Such an actress drivin’ me crazy / But I‘m into it”—perhaps gives us a hint?)

That sex and that sadness are most richly synthesized on the album’s last track, “From the Dining Table.” The song opens with a simple acoustic guitar and Styles gently singing “Played with myself / Where were you / Got drunk by noon / Never felt less cool.” (Those may not be the exact lyrics—my handwriting had really started to break down by this point.) Here’s sad, drunk, masturbating Harry Styles, a jilted lover singing in vaguely Sufjan Stevens-ish tones, later hoping, “Maybe one day you’ll call me / And tell me you’re sorry too.” He’s tried to move on— “Woke up to girl who looked just like you / I almost spoke your name”—but can’t. For all the seriousness of this sentiment, the frankness too, there is something nonetheless kind of cute and puppy dog about it, this earnest and handsome guy talking sensitively about a girl he misses.

I know that’s not the intention, that these are firmly adult emotions that Styles is trying to wrestle with. And of course I’m approaching these songs with the condescension afforded to me by my relative decrepitude. But the way that Styles and his producers—E.P. Jeff Bhasker, along with Alex Salibian, Tyler Johnson, and Kid Harpoon—have assembled such a wide array of throwback music references, from 20, 30, 40 years ago, gives the album an air of precociousness that only highlights the youth of its front man. Granted, a precocious kid who wants to sound like Stevie and Elton and Syd and Lindsey and Liam and Noel and all the rest is a precocious kid with good taste, a precocious kid I wanna know. But it’s still pastiche, still a really well put-together school project. On Harry Styles, Harry Styles shows he isn’t quite grown-up just yet.

Perhaps in his next outing, Styles might look past the love affairs that did him wrong, that broke him down, and sing about other things, too. He needn’t be careful with his heart—it’s undeniably interesting to hear Harry Styles sing about his breakups, and I would do it again. But there’s more than thwarted love out there in the world for a young man to explore. Harry Styles the album gives us modest hope that Harry Styles the artist will find all that too, someday. And, more important, make it his own.