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.
“Aperture”
A fitting first single and opening track, “Aperture” is the showpony of KATTDO. From the anticipation of its throbbing opening beats, Styles signaled his new sound (“dance halls, another cadence”) and a new sense of freedom.