Harry Styles, you have charmed me as of late. Not so much for your music as your…not flamboyance, but exuberance, maybe, or whimsy—qualities in vanishingly short supply with our current crop of male pop stars who don’t make backflips a fixture of their live performances. Your goofy grin while doing objectively goofy choreography that lets us in on the joke. Your softcore running photoshoots and accompanying interviews with Haruki Murakami. Your choice to call your fourth album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. and have that plausibly seem like how you spend your days and nights.
The album title, which enterprising fans have taken to abbreviating as “Kissco” (KATTDO just doesn’t have the same ring to it), also describes the music within. This is not a dance record; it is a pop record inspired by bands Harry Styles likes—the 1975 (“American Girls”), LCD Soundsystem (“Are You Leaving Yet?”), MGMT (“Season 2 Weight Loss”)—who have already done most of the legwork when it comes to blending pop and electronica. However, Styles is working in a tradition: namely, hitting the club to process the fact that you’re getting older. Kiss All the Time is well-curated and expensive-sounding, but makes the most of its star when he’s totally off his game. Here are five takeaways from the album.
Harry’s House
Based on Kiss All the Time’s lead single, “Aperture,” it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that Styles—or at least his producers, Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson—had spent the last few years crate-digging for Joy Orbison and the Orb 12-inches. As it turns out, “Aperture” is an outlier on an album whose nods to the dancefloor never quite tip over into full-on ecstasy. You can still pick up faint traces—the lonely house piano that echoes through “American Girls,” the vocoded chorus on “Ready, Steady, Go!”—throughout the first half of the tracklist, but once “The Waiting Game” dips into full-on adult contemporary, even those start to fade. That may be for the best, considering “Dance No More,” Styles’ stab at retro Kool & the Gang-style funk, is the most punishingly caucasian thing I’ve heard all year. I guess winning Album of the Year over Renaissance wasn’t enough for him—he had to go and try to do it himself.
Zen Mind, Pop Star’s Mind
One Direction was a masterclass in branding. At the peak of the Directioner fandom, each member was identifiable by just a couple of adjectives: Harry was “hot and dangerous,” Zayn was “quiet and mysterious,” Niall was “cute and Irish.” Styles’ current persona is harder to pin down, landing somewhere between free love cult leader (there’s a gospel choir credited on no less than five Kiss All the Time tracks) and a life coach. What are ostensibly come-ons—“It finally appears it’s only love,” “You just need a little love,” “You’ve got to sit yourself down sometimes,”—come off more like sermons or self-help mantras. Over the course of his solo career, Styles has grown into a Liberace-esque figure, minus the feathers and (most of the) rhinestones: a kind voice and a sly smile beamed through the speaker. He’s the bad boy who’ll never break your heart.
Do You Like LCD Soundsystem?
Styles’ birthday only falls two years before the commonly accepted Millennial-Gen Z cutoff, but what Kiss All the Time most reminds me of is my favorite episode of the FX dramedy You’re the Worst, about a young married couple who worry they’ve aged out of being cool. I can’t tell whether Styles turned 30 and started taking acid or turned 30 and stopped taking acid. Either way, James Murphy makes for a natural choice of patron saint. “Are You Listening Yet?” is homage-verging-on-parody of Murphy’s nervy sprechstimme bangers: “God knows your life is on the brink and your therapist’s well-fed/The fix of all fixes, unintimate sex.” Styles has entered the “All My Friends” stage of his life, which you can tell because he keeps singing about what all his friends are doing without him, whether that’s getting married or going out dancing.
Wilde at Heart
Not long after he was cast in her film Don’t Worry Darling, Styles started dating Olivia Wilde in very public, very messy fashion, culminating in “Spit-Gate” at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Several songs on Harry’s House were ostensibly about Wilde, but didn’t address the contentious circumstances around their relationship the way Styles does here. “Holdin’ the weight of the American children whose hearts you break,” he sings on the acoustic ballad “Paint By Numbers,” alluding to Wilde’s kids with her ex-fiancé Jason Sudeikis. “Was it a tragedy when you told her ‘I’m not even thirty-three’?” It’s particularly refreshing to hear Styles, who likes to hide behind a paisley-printed rock star pastiche, take a page out of his most famous ex’s book and lean into the mess of his own life. I also believe he is the exact kind of person to own several adult coloring books.
Styles Guide:
“You touched me goodnight/Butterflied both our bellies/You and me are skipping sleep with dirty feet” (“Ready, Steady, Go!”)
You like the way she talks, but never what she says/You’ve had your tummy tickled, are you listening yet?” (“Are You Listening Yet?”
“If we stay the course we could get it right/But I’m not devoid of an appetite” (“Coming Up Roses”)
“It’s just me on my knees/Squeaky clean fantasy” (“Pop”)
“You Gonna get/your feet wet/Respect, respect your mother” (“Dance No More”)
“You’ve been a baby sleeping upon a candy bar/Till your eyes open on the changing summer light” (“Carla’s Song”)
