{"id":425977,"date":"2026-01-22T14:08:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T14:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/425977\/"},"modified":"2026-01-22T14:08:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T14:08:07","slug":"styles-guide-is-harrys-album-kiss-all-the-time-disco-occasionally-grammatically-correct-harry-styles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/425977\/","title":{"rendered":"Styles guide: is Harry\u2019s album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. grammatically correct? | Harry Styles"},"content":{"rendered":"

We don\u2019t know much about Harry Styles\u2019s first album in four years<\/a> beyond its title \u2013 and it\u2019s already causing some grammatical consternation.<\/p>\n

The follow-up to 2022\u2019s Grammy-winning Harry\u2019s House is a bit more esoterically named: Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. In an era when fans clinically investigate every aspect of pop stars\u2019 lives, it was perhaps inevitable that Styles\u2019s choice of punctuation would draw scrutiny.<\/p>\n

The key dilemma: is the comma in the right place? \u201cWe\u2019re going through a really experimental period with comma usage,\u201d wrote @poeticdweller in an X post<\/a> with nearly 1m views. One concern appeared to be that the two sentences don\u2019t follow the same rules: \u201cThe comma turns the second sentence from a parallel imperative sentence to a fragment that vaguely gestures toward the occasional presence of disco,\u201d noted another<\/a> post, in a sentiment echoed elsewhere<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It all raises two questions: one, did Styles get it wrong? And two, does it matter? (Question three is, of course: who cares? But it\u2019s nice to have a distraction from the daily horrors.)<\/p>\n

The album art for Harry Styles\u2019s Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., out 6 March. Photograph: Columbia Records\/PA<\/p>\n

As for the first question, it\u2019s true that the lines are not parallel. If Harry is speaking in the imperative, telling us to kiss constantly and also to sometimes go to the disco \u2013 using \u201cdisco\u201d as a verb \u2013 then it would be consistent to leave out the comma. But that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean Styles is doing anything wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a perfect construction by our grammatical standards and that\u2019s fun,\u201d says Britt Edelen, AKA @poeticdweller, who wrote the viral post<\/a> and is a PhD candidate in English at Duke. The result, intentional or not, is that \u201cit adds some kineticism to what would otherwise be boring\u201d and \u201cfits into a larger scheme of people trying to articulate things via commas that aren\u2019t actually how we use them\u201d. He cites Virginia Woolf \u2013 known for long, heavily punctuated sentences<\/a> \u2013 as one example; more recently, the movie Die My Love leaves out a comma where we might expect one.<\/p>\n

I think Americans are overly punctilious punctuators. They tend to pay attention to rules and prohibitions a lotEllen Jovin<\/p>\n

Also, disco is not usually a verb. \u201cWhen I see \u2018disco, comma\u2019, it\u2019s giving me a little bit of a mental break,\u201d says Ellen Jovin, author of several books on grammar and star of the road-trip docu-comedy Rebel With a Clause<\/a>, in which she traveled the country forging connections through conversations about sentence structure and punctuation. Edelen agrees: the comma, he says, was probably added to \u201crender the time of speech graphically, as in: disco [pause] occasionally\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the second sentence, Styles has \u201cchanged parts of speech. I\u2019m now working with a noun, and then it\u2019s kind of playful\u201d, he says. The comma leads to \u201ca different adverbial idea: not all the time, just occasionally\u201d. And Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. is surreal language to begin with \u2013 it\u2019s unlikely you\u2019d see the phrase come up in a research paper or international treaty. \u201cPeople are trying to impose some sort of standard sentence punctuation on something that\u2019s not that at all,\u201d Jovin says.<\/p>\n

On top of that, the context matters: this is an album title, not high school English. Even if it were English class, you would see this sort of thing in a novel \u2013 \u201ccommas that you would say the same kind of thing about: \u2018Wait, that\u2019s not right. That doesn\u2019t belong there,\u2019\u201d Jovin says. \u201cThis is just creativity, and I think it\u2019s perfect.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The visuals matter here too; maybe Styles just likes the way the comma looks, especially in a world where we see song and album titles more and more. Unlike physical media \u2013 or early MP3s, which gave users some control over metadata like song names \u2013 music-streaming apps proudly display the title of each song on our phones with the artist\u2019s preferred styling and punctuation. Artists have played with this ability in recent years: on Billie Eilish\u2019s 2017 EP dont smile at me, for instance, most of the song titles were lowercase, while they were in all caps on 2024\u2019s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. Dijon\u2019s album Baby, from last year, includes tracks titled HIGHER! and (Freak It). In the last week of 2018, according to a Quartz analysis<\/a>, eight of Spotify\u2019s Top 200 songs were styled in all caps or all lowercase; the next year, \u201cmore than 30 songs in a typical week\u201d contained \u201cnon-standard capitalization\u201d. (Quartz theorizes that the trend is related to the informality of texting.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth remembering that grammar rules are fluid and change from stylebook to stylebook, which is why, for instance, the album and film titles in this article are not italicized or put in quotes (see \u201ctitles<\/a>\u201d). Unlike the perception we might develop in school, there is no Official Global Consortium of Correct English whose henchmen will break your knees over a comma splice. \u201cI think Americans are overly punctilious punctuators. They tend to pay attention to rules and prohibitions a lot,\u201d Jovin says.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that grammar never matters, of course. There are plenty of rules that stylebooks and experts do agree on, and what counts is clarity. Take the example from the Guardian style guide<\/a> about the importance of a well-placed comma: there\u2019s a difference between dedicating a book \u201cto my parents, Martin Amis and JK Rowling\u201d and \u201cto my parents, Martin Amis, and JK Rowling\u201d.<\/p>\n

When it comes to an album title, on the other hand, ambiguity may be exactly the goal.<\/p>\n

In a possible case of nominative determinism<\/a>, Styles clearly demonstrated<\/a> his penchant for grammar at a 2015 show, adding an apostrophe and an E to a Philadelphia fan\u2019s sign so it said \u201cYou\u2019re so nice\u201d rather than \u201cyour so nice\u201d (he then wrote \u201cthank you \u2013 love, Harry\u201d and gave it back, in case there was any doubt about the sign\u2019s message). If Styles is a grammar nerd, the controversial comma was probably meant to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We don\u2019t know much about Harry Styles\u2019s first album in four years beyond its title \u2013 and it\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":425978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-425977","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/425978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}