Harry Styles’ f*ck it album
Does his weird and opaque new record hit the spot?
After Harry Styles’ new single “Aperture” dropped, a series of residency concerts around the world, at locations like London’s Wembley Stadium and New York City’s Madison Square Garden, went on sale. The ticket prices were exorbitant enough to warrant headlines (aren’t most stadium and arena shows these days anyway?) but they’re selling well, with plenty sold out entirely. The single topped the Billboard Hot 100. In gross, capitalistic terms: The work was pretty much done before an album had even reached us.
Still, thankfully, here it is: Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally, a record that frequently feels like it’s at odds with the success of its maker. It’s an interesting artistic endeavor; one that’s noble, original, and, in an era of lore-laced songs, windingly opaque. Look, I am already a fan of Harry Styles. I’ve seen him maybe more than any other artist in my lifetime. (His best album is Fine Line.) He makes music for stadiums; the masses. When he wants to make a radio banger, he and his team of tight-knit collaborators—most significantly the pop-rock maestro Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson—do. “Watermelon Sugar” and “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” were dangerously inescapable. But there’s not a song on Kiss All the Time… that matches that same formula.
I’ve been trying to figure out if that’s reflective of the album’s quality or my brain trying to calibrate itself to the wavelength Styles finds himself on. He’s sold more records than he probably thought possible. He’s broken records with this new, lengthy tour—12 nights at Wembley Stadium in one year, the most of any artist ever—which seems as much like a challenge for himself as it is an offering to his fans. The album will go to number one globally—nobody has any doubts about that. I imagine he knew that when he went into making it, and so it feels like a record made by a man untethered from the expectation of convincing anyone of anything.
Throughout his whole career, Styles has been burdened by comparison: from his self-titled debut onward, he’s been accused of feeling like a lite version of everyone from Jeff Buckley to David Bowie, Elliott Smith to Mick Jagger. I see it, I hear it, and I haven’t cared much, because the resulting material feels less like a rip off of someone and more like the work of someone channeling the spirits of their idols. Kiss All The Time… has its own touch points, they’re twisted a little differently, and less straightforward, be it LCD Soundsystem or Talking Heads.
These are not exactly the kind of reference points that spawn radio hits these days, which is why the album is admirable from that standpoint. Right now, the charts are shaped by luster, grandiosity and polish: Olivia Dean’s sequined love song “Man I Need,” the bombast of K-Pop Demon Hunters’ “Golden,” even in some ways the emotional extremism of Sombr’s fuzzier “Back to Friends.” We like songs that take us from A to B in a clean and perfect line, but none of the songs on this album fit into any of those rubrics. It’s an intentional “fuck it” album, carefully crafted to his own tastes.
The album liner notes open with a quote of himself, lifting from the lyrics of “Paint By Numbers,” a plaintive beach rock song that feels like a mission statement for the whole record: “Oh what a gift it is to be noticed. But it’s nothing to do with me.” Nothing to do with me. Of course, what he’s referring to is the small group of people who made the record possible. But it also feels like what I think is the album’s only sticking point: This reticence to submit even slightly to pop’s breadcrumb culture.
I don’t need to know the ins and outs of Styles’ personal life, nor do I think that would feed into the quality of the album. But truly excellent pop music gives you a sense of someone. The album is so rich on the ears, the production ambitious, but it’s easy to tap out of what Styles is saying because it’s so hard to lay it like tracing paper over your own life.
You don’t need exposing specifics for that, you just need a clearer common ground. Take, for example, “Everything is Romantic” by Charli xcx. “Bad tattoos on leather tanned skin / Jesus Christ on a plastic sign / Fall in love again and again.” I know where Charli is, and how it’s making her feel: the sense of unbridled euphoria fuelled by beaming sunshine in Catholic southern Europe.
On Styles’ rhythmic “Are You Listening Yet?”: “It’s like your taking up arms, but the message is wet / It sounds inviting, but you don’t believe in it yet.” I’m dancing but I’m not sure I’m connecting to it in quite the same way, because I’m not quite sure what he’s talking about. And that’s not in the same unwieldy way a lyrical journeyman like Joanna Newsom puts her songs together, I just feel like there’s a conversation happening that I’ve walked into, and everyone present refuses to help me catch up.
There are exceptions to this: the feverishly catchy “Pop” (next single, please) favors a straight and simple chorus over big rock guitar twangs and a vintage synth, and it works in its favor. “I wanna take up all your time” = great, easy pop lyric. “Dance No More” is so unafraid of earning Chic comparisons that it feels like the guy is just having fun with it.
The best song on the whole thing is the most peculiar one, “Season 2 Weight Loss,” a sort of sad freak-synth drum and bass ballad with vocals from Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell. It’s the closest we get to what I assumed this whole album would sound like, and would love a whole break-off project in the same vein.
My God, how many pop stars feel a sense of financial and image security and use it to churn out mass-targeted trashy slop? Most! Even if he’s not giving me much to connect with emotionally, I’m still moving my feet to Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally. I think that’s all Harry Styles wants.
