When Harry’s House came out in 2022, Harry Styles seemed on top of the world, finally rid of his boy-band beginnings. Starring roles in Don’t Worry Darling and My Policeman, a genuinely good SNL hosting gig, Coachella headliner sets, a history-making Vogue cover and its interior design-magazine sibling, and record-breaking concert residencies told one part of the story, and his Grammy-winning third album told the other. Harry’s House felt legitimately huge upon arrival, thanks to the pop hits like “Late Night Talking” and “Music For a Sushi Restaurant,” as well as Earth-stopping ballads like “Matilda,” a still-career-best effort.
The songwriting four years ago felt promising, the grooves were chameleonic, the singalongs came stadium-sized, and Styles performed every track like the rent was due, even if his lyrics barely said anything at all. He tried on his heroes’ ideas but brightened them for younger audiences, and guest accompaniments from Dev Hynes, Pino Palladino, and John Mayer supplied him with co-signs he didn’t need but gladly accepted. Should Harry’s House have beaten Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE for Album of the Year? Absolutely fucking not. Did it cement Styles as the 2020s’ most palatable white boy? You bet your ass. So it’s really too bad most of that excitement, popstardom, and curiosity is absent from his fourth album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.
In an exclusive SiriusXM interview, Styles told Mayer that he wanted to explore “being on the other side of the audience experience” on Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally., which instilled in him a “feeling of being in the audience,” “dancing and singing with strangers.” Styles definitely succeeds in making himself blend in with the crowd. The album exposes his weaknesses as a singer, as Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson’s co-production often leads to over-processed or totally muted vocals (“Pop” and “Season 2 Weight Loss,” respectively). Even his double-tracked voice during “American Girls” stalls when placed next to reverbed piano and synth bridges. It’s not until the admittedly catchy “I’ve known you for ages” chorus shows up that Styles’ warm tenor sounds even somewhat animated.
Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. was inspired by Berghain—the same Berlin club that ROSALÍA used to build pop music’s mystical, erotic future last year—an LCD Soundsystem concert, and Styles’ residence in Italy. And while his James Murphy come-ons in “Aperture” can’t save it from being the least interesting lead single of his to date, I struggle to get past just how much Styles sounds like a visitor on his own album. The sharpest moments here come, disappointingly, from guest stars: Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner lays down a robust kickdrum on “Ready, Steady, Go!” and “Pop,” while Wolf Alice’s Ellie Roswell adds lush backup vox and Yaffra supplies piano and synth. It’s the House Gospel Choir that emboldens “Are You Listening Yet?” and “Dance No More” amid Styles’ otherwise subdued takes on electro-pop and dance-rock. The latter features rhythm interludes similar to “Uptown Funk”—a song that already got sued for being a copy of another song.
“Ready, Steady, Go!” and “Season 2 Weight Loss” briefly inundate Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. with an abundance of key changes, as the former uses thick bass jolts, title repetition, and inside-out vocal clips to sketch an exciting house/techno interplay, but Styles finally finds his groove in the record’s standout middle section. “Taste Back” pairs bubbly synths with drum machines and old-world “ooh-ooh” harmonies. It’s a dynamic pop song with the first foregrounded use of electric guitars, reminding me that this album really could have used Mitch Rowland’s chops. The flowery, spiraling electronics in “The Waiting Game” make for an interesting companion to the stripped-back synthetic drums, while the “tantalize/titillate” wordplay is cheeky and the “You can romanticize your shortcomings, ignore your agency to stop / Write a ballad with the details while skimming off the top” verse is Styles at his most sincere. “Coming Up Roses,” which is the only track on the album written solely by Styles, is dramatic and swooning, layered in colorful plucks and luxuriating strings. Styles’ voice doesn’t quite decorate the song fully, but a 30-person orchestra, co-arranged by Jules Buckley, narrows the gap. The sun-dappled, sore-thumbed track ends on a classical instrumental break that turns playful, oddly (and excellently) channeling Bacharach on a tape that’s otherwise industrial, fluid, and trippy.
After Harry’s House, one would have hoped to see Styles take some kind of leap lyrically. Images of dirty feet, pastries, talking in tongues, European drinking habits, and dirty clowns stick out on an otherwise boring, sometimes cringe-inducing record that sells oddly-shaped innuendos and vocab: “the message is wet” (“Are You Listening Yet?”); “you gotta get your feet wet, respect your mother” (“Dance No More”); “Did you get your taste back, or do you just need a little love?” (“Taste Back”). Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. is a dance record and Styles wants us to be sure of it, hitting us over the head with the “if you must join a movement, make sure there’s dancing” line on “Are You Listening Yet?” like we have short-term memory loss four tracks in. The word choice in “Pop” is plain yet puzzling, as Styles tears through with “Daytime mainlining, no more rolling papers / Catching stray dogs, try but you can’t tame them.” I have no clue what any of that means, and the song provides no further context. And, in most cases, I could forgive an artist for just saying things when the music behind them is exciting, but Styles’ orgasm tribute comes dried out.
But Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. does have its lyrical moments. The “you touched me goodnight, butterflied both our bellies” part in “Ready, Steady, Go!” feels ripped from a page in the same Richard Brautigan book that inspired “Watermelon Sugar.” In the penultimate “Paint By Numbers,” this album’s “Matilda,” Styles laments someone “holding the weight of the American children whose hearts you break” in a naked performance softened by Mark Crown’s trumpet. The Phoenix-inspired closer, “Carla’s Song,” has pretty lines like “from your head to your toes, saw the light in the gold that you discovered through your eyes in awe, melodies like the tide,” but it’s too little too late. There, Styles’ singing labors through a tapestry of lasering synths, muted guitar plucks, anthemic drums, and streaky, ploppy bass notes that Harpoon and Johnson have built for him.
I don’t know what to do with Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. I’m rooting for Harry Styles, because he’s got enough talent to be a superstar for generations, but his fourth solo effort suggests that he’s not interested in doing pop bangers right now, nor does he care to remedy his own historically weak, opaque writing. The music is pleasant enough, but there is no “As It Was,” “Golden,” or “Adore You” here. And, frankly, Styles needs songs that are big like those, because he’s just not as interesting when all of the would-be beat drops never pay off. On “Pop,” there’s a great dose of blistering guitar that annoyingly gets trapped in the background. That’s Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. in essence: all the attractive parts are sacrificed for mood and vibe. But if you strip this album of all the effects, breakbeats, and electronics, most of the songs could not stand on their own. [Columbia]
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
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