Is Harry Styles' 'Coming Up Roses' a Waltz? Its Sheet Music Says 12/8

On paper, no. The official piano/vocal/chords sheet music for Harry Styles' 'Coming Up Roses' writes it in 12/8: four slow beats to the bar, each beat split into three. That three-way split is what gives it a waltz's sway. Our beat tracker, run on the official lyric video, puts the pulse at about 176 a minute, with the low notes falling into groups of three and the harmony turning over every 12 pulses, one bar of 12/8. On his fourth album it is the only song that moves in threes: our test hears the other 11 in fours, and their sheet music prints them in 4/4 or 2/2.

On 26 October Styles released a video for the song, directed by Bradley & Pablo, in which a hall full of strangers, one of them in a bridal veil, gathers around him; its credits list a choreographer, Ryan Heffington, and a dance teacher. Four days later, on 30 October, it went to radio as a single, the album's fourth by English Wikipedia's count, almost eight months after the album. Google's autocomplete, read with US settings on 4 November, offers 'a waltz' among its endings for 'is coming up roses' and completes 'coming up roses time' with 'signature'. Of the 400 top comments under the video that day, 64 mention dancing or the ballroom and four use the word waltz.

What time signature is 'Coming Up Roses'? 12/8, and our test hears its threes

A beat tracker finds the steady pulse a listener might tap along to, but it does not say where the bars begin. For that we followed the harmony. At every pulse we measured how far the chord, read as the balance of the 12 notes of the octave, had moved since the pulse before, and then checked which cycles those changes came back on: every 3, 6, 12 and 24 pulses for music in threes, every 4, 8, 16 and 32 for music in fours.

First the test had to tell the two apart on songs whose answer we already knew, the kind of check we also ran for Olivia Rodrigo's 'the cure'. Billy Joel's 'Piano Man', a fast waltz, scored 0.585 for threes and minus 0.272 for fours. Styles' own 'As It Was', a song in 4/4, went the other way, 0.119 for threes and 0.259 for fours. Christina Perri's 'A Thousand Years' came out in threes too, and so did Ed Sheeran's 'Perfect', a slow ballad printed in 12/8.

'Coming Up Roses' scored 0.151 for threes and minus 0.042 for fours. Its harmony turns over every 12 pulses, roughly every 4.1 seconds, and never settles on the 8- and 16-pulse cycles of a song in four. Below 200 hertz, where the bass parts sit, the strongest short cycle is every third pulse, not every second or fourth. We also cut the song into overlapping stretches of 48 pulses. From about 0:32 to 3:48, all but one of them scored below zero for fours, and that one only reached 0.03; the instrumental break, between 2:32 and 3:24 on the lyric timings, shows no sign of fours either. In the opening half-minute, a few plucked strings under the voice, the test leans to fours instead, on too little sound to count for much.

The test hears how the pulse is grouped, not how a writer would bar it: a quick 3/4 waltz counts its beats in threes, while 6/8 and 12/8 split each beat into three, and to a beat tracker they can look alike. The sheet music settles that. The piano/vocal/chords edition published by Universal Music Publishing Group marks 'Coming Up Roses' 'Moderately slow', at 60 dotted crotchets a minute, and our tracker's groups of three come at 58.8 a minute. The tempo can therefore be given as 176 BPM, counting every pulse, or as about 60, counting every beat. Our key finder, which matches the balance of notes against major and minor profiles, hears it in B flat major.

Can you waltz to 'Coming Up Roses'? At Viennese speed

A 12/8 bar holds four of those groups of three, so the printed song moves at about 15 bars a minute, a slow ballad. A waltzing couple steps on the pulse instead, three steps to a group, and counted that way the song runs at 58.8 groups a minute. The World DanceSport Federation's competition rules put the Viennese waltz, the fast turning waltz, at 58 to 60 bars a minute, and the slow waltz at 28 to 30. 'Piano Man' moves at almost the same rate, 177.7 pulses a minute to 176.3. A couple who waltz to the record at its own speed are dancing the Viennese kind. It rarely feels that quick, because its chords tend to change only once every 12 pulses and the chorus lines come about four seconds apart, the long ones eight to ten.

No other track on the album scores below zero for fours; the lowest, 'The Waiting Game', is at 0.11. From the lead single 'Aperture' to the closer 'Carla's Song', all 11 lean to fours on our test, and all are printed in 4/4, or 2/2 for 'The Waiting Game'.

Is 'Coming Up Roses' a love song? Harry Styles began it as a Christmas one

Styles has said he started the song in December 2025 as a Christmas song, gave up on that after two lines, and finished it as a love song. The season survives in the opening lines, where the singer asks someone to tell him their fears and says he has put the clocks back for the season. Our sound classifier, which knows nothing of that interview, gives 'Christmas music' as its top label for three sections in a row, from 1:38 to 2:23. The credits list a celeste, played by the arranger Jules Buckley, along with vibraphone and marimba, a tuba and 18 violins. Styles is the only credited writer, which makes it the one song on the album without a co-writer.

The title comes only once, near the end of the first verse. “And everything seems to be coming up roses” uses the old idiom for things going well, and the next breath turns it into worry: if both of them are right, are they still in step? In the chorus he proposes one night of drinking and chasing the hangover, “Just for tonight, let's go hangover chasing”, and promises to talk at length about why that is safe, stumbling over his words on the way to the truth. It ends with the night seen out together, the other person's head resting on him.

In the second verse the tears are the other person's, and he reads them as his doing: his wants, his guilt, the fear that they think he does not want them there. He asks whether all of this is bringing them closer or whether he has become a back-seat driver in their life, the passenger who tells the driver how to drive. After the instrumental break the last sung line settles on the two of them alone, and the song ends on wordless la-la-las.

Why Harry Styles' 'Coming Up Roses' is climbing again

The numbers rose with the video. The song had re-entered Spotify's global daily chart on 18 October, at No. 156; it was No. 80 on 25 October, with 1,347,620 plays, and on 27 October, the day after the video, No. 41 with 1,899,771, a rise of 41 percent. It slipped on Halloween and stood at No. 36 on 2 November. On Billboard's charts dated 7 November, whose tracking week took in the video, it rose from 73 to 52 on the Hot 100 and from 110 to 51 on the Global 200, and in Britain it climbed from 59 to 35 on the Official Singles Chart, its highest there. The video passed 10.3 million views in just over nine days. On Spotify's weekly global chart the song's best week is still its first, No. 18 in March.

Another song on our global music trends pages, Aoi Teshima's 'Mori no Chiisana Restaurant', also sways in three. 'Coming Up Roses' is the one song in threes on a dance-pop record, and its video is set in a dance class. Written as a slow 12/8 ballad, it still moves at a pace a ballroom dancer could take as a Viennese waltz.