Album Review: Harry Styles – Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally.
4.0 / 5
Harry Styles is the sort of cultural powerhouse who can vanish for years, do the whole eat-pray-love arc, pick up marathon running, and come back an even bigger phenomenon than when he left. The buzz around his return was genuinely unhinged; we were on the ground at the London listening party where thousands of fans queued around the block just to be first to hear a single track. It proved his star status was bulletproof even before the "Together, Together" tour sold out in seconds. The album itself doesn't quite hold onto the euphoric high of lead single "Aperture," but it's so much more than a basic pop record.
Since the sun set on Harry’s House in 2022, Styles has essentially been a ghost, sidestepping the "content-heavy" obsession of modern pop artists to simply just live a life. Whether he was running the Berlin Marathon in under three hours or showing up at a random haircut appointment in Rome, he’s spent his hiatus becoming a "real audience member" again. He’s been vocal about how this record was born in the crowd rather than the studio; specifically citing the "pure joy" of watching LCD Soundsystem in a Madrid car park and the emotional weight of Radiohead’s 2025 London residency.
This isn't just PR fluff, either. You can hear those influences in the DNA of the new material. He’s moved away from the 70s soft-rock warmth of his earlier solo work and stepped into something much more electronic and "Berlin-techno" adjacent. It’s a bold shift for a stadium-conquering star, trading safe radio hooks for modular synths and five-minute-long vamps. He's essentially gone from the one everyone had their eyes on to the one with his eyes on everyone else, and Kiss All the Time is what that looks like when it lands on tape.
Enough has been said already about opening track “Aperture,” which Harry rocked at the BRITs last weekend, but the record doesn't skip a beat, rolling straight into a second track that keeps that same dance-electro pulse going. “American Girls” sounds like a high-end ballad inspired by The 1975, dealing with the common theme of his friends being in love while he watches from the sidelines. What his circle is up to runs throughout the whole record; whether it's who they're kissing or who they're dancing with, Harry is wrestling with getting older the same way we all do – by measuring himself against the people closest to him, caught between living it up and settling down. After all, he is just as susceptible to millennial coping mechanisms as the rest of us, except where we're buying air fryers, he's running marathons.
The production here deserves its flowers. The instrumentation constantly pushes to the front, and earns its place there through intricate drum rhythms and piano work that fills every corner of the room. Harry seems to be happy letting the music do the heavy lifting, but the record really excels when he leans into the scale of it all. There are at least five songs featuring backing choirs, including the cathartic dance track “Are You Listening Yet?”, which is easily my favourite on the record for how clearly it puts the production front and centre.
Adding to the indie-rock credentials, Harry slots Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell into several tracks for backing vocals. This is best heard on “Taste Back,” a classic indie-pop moment where her ethereal harmonies add layers of depth to the flowing synths. “Season 2 Weight Loss” is another standout indie-dance track; between the clattering drums provided by Tom Skinner (The Smile) and the dark, moody vocals, it sounds like Harry has been hanging out in the studio with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker.
From there, however, the album dives into a more vocal-focused pop sound, and I’ll be honest, I lost a little bit of interest. It still sounds "expensive" (and with a credit list that looks like one of a Hollywood movie’s, it certainly should), but it’s just not as musically adventurous as that first half. While the spread of choir performers and string sections is insane, the second half feels a bit more like the party is winding down.
“Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.” is a masterfully produced record (with a brilliant, meme-ready album cover) that might actually put off a few casual fans due to its lack of traditional pop "bangers." But based on the traction it’s getting, it’s a record that will cause reverberations across the industry, signaling a move toward the darker, electronic pop sound that indie artists have been pioneering for years.