{"id":461108,"date":"2026-03-06T17:49:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T17:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/461108\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T17:49:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T17:49:07","slug":"5-takeaways-from-harry-styles-new-album-kiss-all-the-time-disco-occasionally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/461108\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Takeaways From Harry Styles\u2019 New Album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally."},"content":{"rendered":"

Harry Styles<\/a>, you have charmed me as of late. Not so much for your music as your\u2026not flamboyance, but exuberance, maybe, or whimsy\u2014qualities in vanishingly short supply with our current crop of male<\/a> pop<\/a> stars<\/a> who don\u2019t make backflips<\/a> a fixture of their live performances. Your goofy grin<\/a> while doing objectively goofy choreography that lets us in on the joke. Your softcore running photoshoots<\/a> and accompanying interviews with Haruki Murakami. Your choice to call your fourth album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.<\/a> and have that plausibly seem like how you spend your days and nights.<\/p>\n

The album title, which enterprising fans have taken to abbreviating as \u201cKissco\u201d (KATTDO just doesn\u2019t 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\u2014the 1975<\/a> (\u201cAmerican Girls\u201d), LCD Soundsystem<\/a> (\u201cAre You Leaving Yet?\u201d), MGMT<\/a> (\u201cSeason 2 Weight Loss\u201d)\u2014who 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\u2019re getting older. Kiss All the Time is well-curated and expensive-sounding, but makes the most of its star when he\u2019s totally off his game. Here are five takeaways from the album.<\/p>\n

Harry\u2019s House<\/p>\n

Based on Kiss All the Time\u2019s lead single, \u201cAperture,\u201d it wasn\u2019t a stretch to imagine that Styles\u2014or at least his producers, Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson\u2014had spent the last few years crate-digging for Joy Orbison<\/a> and the Orb<\/a> 12-inches. As it turns out, \u201cAperture\u201d 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\u2014the lonely house piano that echoes through \u201cAmerican Girls,\u201d the vocoded chorus on \u201cReady, Steady, Go!\u201d\u2014throughout the first half of the tracklist, but once \u201cThe Waiting Game\u201d dips into full-on adult contemporary, even those start to fade. That may be for the best, considering \u201cDance No More,\u201d Styles\u2019 stab at retro Kool & the Gang<\/a>-style funk, is the most punishingly caucasian thing I\u2019ve heard all year. I guess winning<\/a> Album of the Year over Renaissance<\/a> wasn\u2019t enough for him\u2014he had to go and try to do it himself.<\/p>\n

Zen Mind, Pop Star\u2019s Mind<\/p>\n

One Direction was a masterclass in branding. At the peak of the Directioner fandom, each member was identifiable by just a couple of adjectives<\/a>: Harry was \u201chot and dangerous,\u201d Zayn<\/a> was \u201cquiet and mysterious,\u201d Niall<\/a> was \u201ccute and Irish.\u201d Styles\u2019 current persona is harder to pin down, landing somewhere between free love cult leader (there\u2019s a gospel choir credited on no less than five Kiss All the Time tracks) and a life coach. What are ostensibly come-ons\u2014\u201cIt finally appears it\u2019s only love,\u201d \u201cYou just need a little love,\u201d \u201cYou\u2019ve got to sit yourself down sometimes,\u201d\u2014come 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\u2019s the bad boy who\u2019ll never break your heart.<\/p>\n

Do You Like LCD Soundsystem?<\/p>\n

Styles\u2019 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<\/a> of the FX dramedy You\u2019re the Worst, about a young married couple who worry they\u2019ve aged out of being cool. I can\u2019t 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. \u201cAre You Listening Yet?\u201d is homage-verging-on-parody of Murphy\u2019s nervy<\/a> sprechstimme<\/a> bangers<\/a>: \u201cGod knows your life is on the brink and your therapist\u2019s well-fed\/The fix of all fixes, unintimate sex.\u201d Styles has entered the \u201cAll My Friends\u201d stage of his life, which you can tell because he keeps singing about what all his friends are doing without him, whether that\u2019s getting married or going out dancing.<\/p>\n

Wilde at Heart<\/p>\n

Not long after he was cast in her film Don\u2019t Worry Darling, Styles started dating Olivia Wilde in very public, very messy fashion, culminating in \u201cSpit-Gate<\/a>\u201d at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Several songs on Harry\u2019s House were ostensibly about Wilde, but didn\u2019t address the contentious circumstances around their relationship the way Styles does here. \u201cHoldin\u2019 the weight of the American children whose hearts you break,\u201d he sings on the acoustic ballad \u201cPaint By Numbers,\u201d alluding to Wilde\u2019s kids with her ex-fianc\u00e9 Jason Sudeikis. \u201cWas it a tragedy when you told her \u2018I\u2019m not even thirty-three\u2019?\u201d It\u2019s 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<\/a>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Styles Guide:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou touched me goodnight\/Butterflied both our bellies\/You and me are skipping sleep\u205fwith\u205fdirty\u205ffeet\u201d (\u201cReady, Steady, Go!\u201d)<\/p>\n

You like the way she talks, but never what she says\/You’ve had your tummy tickled, are you listening yet?\u201d (\u201cAre You Listening Yet?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we stay the course we could get it right\/But I\u2019m not devoid of an appetite\u201d (\u201cComing Up Roses\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s just me on my knees\/Squeaky clean fantasy\u201d (\u201cPop\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cYou Gonna get\/your feet wet\/Respect, respect your mother\u201d (\u201cDance No More\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’ve been a baby sleeping upon a candy bar\/Till your eyes open on the changing summer light\u201d (\u201cCarla\u2019s Song\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harry Styles, you have charmed me as of late. Not so much for your music as your\u2026not flamboyance,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,49445,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-461108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-takeaways","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}