Kiss All the Time was inspired by LCD Soundsystem, the Berlin club scene, and marathon running—few other pop stars have ever telegraphed more clearly that they’re trying to find themselves, or get away from it all, or both. On its most coherent songs, Styles seems to grasp at the idea that he’s a cipher. “It’s like you’re taking up arms, but the message is wet/It sounds inviting, but you don’t believe it yet,” he intones on “Are You Listening Yet?”, one of a few songs where he attempts to capture the strung-out cool of prime dance-punk. On “Season 2 Weight Loss,” he admits, “It’s hard to tell when the thoughts are my own,” a sad indictment of a record that sounds like it was written with maximum respectability in mind.
It’s a foregone conclusion, then, that Styles’ entrance into the world of dance music feels a little watery. Fans looking for their introduction to club hedonism might be surprised to learn that wild, sweaty abandon can be conjured with the same big crash cymbals and plinky guitar lines that have featured on every other Harry Styles record. There are enough nods on Kiss All the Time to Styles’ stated influences—-a sharp, craggy synth running through “Season 2 Weight Loss”; chattering drum machine on the bittersweet Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-ish highlight “Taste Back”—that you can at least identify his intention. (This isn’t Dua Lipa talking up a Britpop album before delivering nothing of the sort with Radical Optimism.) But Styles undermines himself every time with moves straight out of the stadium-pop playbook: A dazed acoustic guitar interlude on “Ready, Steady, Go!”; a big festival chorus on “American Girls”; the aforementioned big drum fills on “Carla’s Song.” By regressing to the safe embrace of the Los Angeles producer toolkit over and over again—in a world where James Murphy has never met a check he couldn’t cash—Styles denies any of the catharsis or release he supposedly found in the club.
It’s a shame: Styles’ rarefied status and wacky fashion sense mean that he, of all stars, could afford to genuinely break form without ruffling any feathers. He asks to be taken more seriously than practically any of his contemporaries (and expresses marketable good taste always) and backs up that request by paying lip service to Haruomi Hosono and Joni Mitchell, doing an interview with Haruki Murakami, mounting collaborations with JW Anderson and the Southbank Centre. The general public has, by and large, taken him at his word, anointing him pop’s Most Tasteful. But Styles rarely lives up to his end of the bargain.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with spritzing a little LCD on the wrists, dabbing some Phoenix on the neck, and then getting dressed up in your usual Keane. He wouldn’t be the first pop star to have a life-changing experience that only changed their life a little. But it suggests that Styles, an idiosyncratic, generational artist in all but art, is so terrified of exposing himself that he’s unwilling to fundamentally change his formula at all. Either that, or he only trusts his audience enough to give them a diet version of a sound he loves. It’s strange: Wasn’t this all supposed to be for you?
