One Direction famously did not dance, but a decade after their dissolution (“indefinite hiatus,” for those still hoping!), the group’s most successful solo artist, compassionate king Harry Styles, has been called to choreo.
With his fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., Styles surrenders to quivering jazz hands and riffs on the Electric Slide—as seen in his Patrick-Bateman-at-a-flash-mob performance at the Brit Awards—and explores an electronic new sound that makes you want to chicken-cutlet yourself in glitter and fly to Amsterdam for his Memorial Day shows. (Anyone else for weekend two?)
Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. is the one we Harries, a feverishly unwell (complimentary) bunch, have been waiting for. In the years since his last album, 2022’s eclectic Harry’s House, dropped and the serotonin explosion that was his five-continent Love on Tour wrapped in 2023, we’ve pined for him like an unrequited lover. The break was long and torturous for fans but clearly restorative for Styles, who lolled in the Italian countryside with Alessandro Michele, bonded with a new niece, and found himself unassumingly among the masses in the Vatican when the conclave elected Pope Leo XIV last June. The message on the gray baseball hat Styles wore that day was a clue about the album to come: “techno is my boyfriend.”
It tracks that Styles, a pop star known for meeting the moment, is luring us all to the dance floor now. Styles has always been an antidote to toxic, Trumpian masculinity, from his earnest mantra to “Treat people with kindness” to appearing on the cover of Vogue in a resplendent, ruffled Gucci gown. Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. continues the trend: in harsh times, he wants us to dance and maybe cry at the same time.
The album is true to its quirky title: the disco is, in fact, occasional, while there are more songs of the kiss variety—the kind of singer-songwriter sweetness Styles is known for, infused with more techno sparkle. Here, an utterly biased, song-by-song review of Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.
A fitting first single and opening track, “Aperture” is the showpony of KATTDO. From the anticipation of its throbbings opening beats, Styles signaled his new sound (“dance halls, another cadence”) and a new sense of freedom.
After almost two years on stage for Love on Tour, he rediscovered what it meant to be an audience member during his self-imposed hiatus, including at a Radiohead show and at Berlin club mecca Berghain. (Imagine encountering Styles, sweaty, in the bathroom line?) “Aperture” gives that dance floor communion back to Harries, his way: “We belong together” is a karmic post-script to TPWK, a mantra wrapped in hope and light. Harry for Nobel Peace Prize?
Kiss or disco?: Disco
No Styles album is complete without a burst of his trademark female reverence (“Adore You,” “Woman,” “Boyfriends”). My delusional gut reaction to the line “those American girls you spend your life with” was that Styles was just getting a little more specific about his appreciation for state-side fans (definitely not any number of his exes!). Alas, he told Zane Lowe it was inspired by watching his three closest friends get married and contemplating the vulnerability of hitching your life to someone else’s.
Kiss or Disco? Kiss. “American Girls”is a pleasing earworm to blast on a spring day. Please refrain from wearing matching flag sweaters and scoring your 4th of July posts to it.
Once the worst winter in recent memory is over, this will be a spring-to-summer pregame anthem, a pump-up song to mix your dressing drink and contemplate the magic of the night to. What separates it from any number of Apple commercial-ish 2010s electro-pop songs is a gorgeous, aching chorus that’s quintessential Styles. Bonus points for the “pronti, quasi, vai,” a nod to Styles’s surrogate Italian status.
Kiss or Disco? Disco
This slow-burning, spoken-word-slash-techno track speaks to the soul of Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.: Styles’s quarter-ish-life identity crisis. “God knows your life is on the brink,” he sings, “and your therapist’s well-fed.” He turned 30 in 2024, during his years of (at least some) rest and relaxation. Stepping away gave him the chance to ponder if he was truly fulfilled by pop stardom, or if he was just drifting through the motions; to get quiet and, like the title asks, tune in to his own intuition. Thankfully, Styles is back and experimenting on a song that sounds unlike any of his others.
Kiss or disco: Avant-garde disco
The tender-hearted, baby-angelic Styles that Harries so cherish—the man scorned on “Cherry” or “To Be So Lonely”—returns on this sweet electro-love song that seems to be about a French minx who keeps Styles guessing (“Must be lonely out in Paris if you talk like that/It was tough at the time, but you called me back”). Harry can seem otherworldly onstage, but vulnerable songs like “Taste Back” remind us he’s human after all.
Kiss or disco: Kiss
Track six is classic Styles, his gravelly voice clear and undoctored for the first time on KATTDO. What sounds like a relatable lament about the emptiness of dating (“but it all adds up to nothing”) is, according to Styles, more a nod to his tangled, tenuous relationship to music (recall that this is a man who began his career in a boy band at age 16). There’s introspection about his role—“Write a ballad with the details while skimming off the top”—and some self-loathing, too; he notably refers to himself as “a dirty clown,” my new favorite insult.
Kiss or disco: Once again, kiss!
Styles’s enlightenment continues— “you’ve got to sit yourself down sometimes”—as does his his reckoning with fame and idolatry: “do you love me now?” Harry, we do, but the existential question on KATTDO is whether Styles loves himself, independent of Grammys and glittering arenas. He’s long drawn lofty comparisons to Bowie and Jagger, but after hatching on X Factor and coming of age on the world stage, it seems the greater achievement is simply self-acceptance.
Kiss or disco? Kiss
If “Aperture” is KATTDO’s “As It Was,” “Coming Up Roses” is its “Fine Line.” The album’s only ballad is a gutting, heart-clutching beauty and one of Styles’s greatest of all time. The only song on the album where he’s solely credited for the music and lyrics—and accompanied by a full, searing orchestra—“Coming Up Roses” creeps under your skin, making you want to cry and fall in love and cry a little more. The instrumentals are primed to be the anachronistic score for a poignant period piece. And if you weren’t already in shambles, the purity of Styles’s “la-la-las” will end you.
Kiss or disco? Kiss (and cry)
After wrestling with pop stardom, Styles wholly embraces it with “Pop,” while also winking at the spectacle of it all. Catchy and infectious, this is what a sparkly, fun Styles bop sounds like now. My only issue here is the image of Styles on his knees somehow being “squeaky clean.”
Kiss or disco? Disco
The promise of disco fulfilled! A jam both you and your mother who actually lived through disco will bump butts to? Styles captures the transcendental power of the dance floor, as he experienced it himself, swearing, “there’s no difference in between the tears and the sweat.” He’s also starting to crack the inner wrestling of KATTDO, seemingly finding a way to fulfill both fans and himself: “Keep your customer satisfied/and live your life.” Styles is growing up before our very eyes.
Kiss or disco: Truly disco
After all the production embellishments of KATTDO, “Paint by Numbers” is the sonic equivalent of ring-around-the-rosie or running through a sprinkler (even as it’s being interpreted as Styles’s explanation for shirking commitment and bolting to the club— “Was it a tragedy when you told her/I’m not even 33?”). No matter where he goes musically, I believe Styles will always be this completely lovely singer-songwriter, right down to the bittersweet trumpet.
Kiss or disco? Kiss
The dreamy, synth-laden album closer was inspired by a new friend (Styles pierced his own bubble and met a lot of people during his normie break). If KATTDO was an experimental, choose-your-own-adventure trip for both Styles and Harries, he leaves us here on a note of hope and encouragement: “it’s all waiting there for you.”
Kiss or disco: Disco at the closing time, walking to the after-party with your friends
