All the news is bad and the world is going to hell in a handcart. Is Harry Styles the low-stakes hero we need right now? The former One Direction superstar’s fourth solo album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., arrives on Friday with an air of arty inconsequentiality that belies its blockbuster status.
With feather-light melodies, gauzy synths and sketchily oblique references to “perfect lighting”, sessions with “well-fed” therapists, elegant hangovers and dining on “your favourite pastries”, it sometimes sounds like an episode of Emily in Paris set to sub bass and cool beats. Yet it is expected to land like Godzilla crushing everything in its path. Who needs substance when you have an abundance of style?
By the time he wrapped up a two-year world tour in 2023, Styles had graduated from selling out arenas to stadiums, ascending to the status of pop’s leading man and almost single-handedly maintaining Britain’s standing as a global musical superpower. After a three-year break, the 32-year-old is staging a comeback that includes a 12-night residency at Wembley Stadium in London and 30 nights at Madison Square Garden in New York.
It is weirdly hard to imagine these slender, whimsical songs transposed to such an immense scale. Co-written and produced with long-time collaborator Thomas Hull (once something of an indie pop darling in his own right as Kid Harpoon), the album has the offbeat charm of art school students playing in a hi-tech studio on an unlimited budget.
Styles has described it as “the audio representation of a long diary entry” but, if so, it’s a diary written in code. Lyrics are cryptic enough to mean whatever the listener wants them to mean, litanies of sweet nothings (“The message is wet / It sounds inviting but you don’t believe it”) and voguish catchphrases (“DJs don’t dance no more”, “Respect your mother!”).
He grapples with casual sex (Ready Steady Go, Pop) and euphoric dancing (Aperture, Dance No More) without ever appearing to break a sweat. Quasi-philosophical observations (“There is a bridge that leads to troubled waters / If you know then you know, if you don’t then you don’t”) blend with soft-focus soundscapes on emptily beguiling ditties (Paint By Numbers, Carla’s Song) that carry all the emotional heft of a luxury perfume ad.
The album is replete with treated noises that encompass throbbing rave sounds, cheesy Eighties synth-pop hooks, vintage video game jingles and ambient tones. Styles’s soft, appealing voice shifts from intimate murmurs on verses to something higher and more rapturous on choruses. Ellie Rowsell, of British indie rock darlings Wolf Alice, can be heard shadowing his light croon with high harmonies, while elsewhere choral and gospel vocals arrive swathed in echo. The results are always interesting and fun, but often hard to get a hold of – a slippery confection of influences that never stay still for too long lest they reveal a lack of depth.
It seems to be a foregone conclusion that Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. is going to conquer the world – and it will be one of the oddest pop records to do so. In this respect, Styles has his finger on the pulse of contemporary listeners in our turbulent times, feeding an appetite for edgeless escapism, music that hints at big ideas and emotional depths without actually having either.
Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. is out on March 6
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