Harry Styles spends most of his wonderful new album on the dance floor. “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally” is his first new music in four years – since he took the pop game by storm with “Harry’s House” and then simply left it behind. But the most powerful moment is the quietest. “Coming Up Roses” is the emotional heart of the album, one of the few ballads, the only song he wrote entirely alone. It’s his most direct romantic approach to a classic pop love song. But it’s the kind of romantic invitation that begins: “Tell me your fears.” It’s really about doubt and vulnerability – and that’s exactly why it hits so precisely where Harry is currently standing.
The new album is essentially a twin of his 2017 solo debut – both are “fresh start” albums, both avoid obvious hits or grand gestures. He sings bluntly about escaping the celebrity trap, for example in “Paint by Numbers”. The entire “Kissco” album feels emotionally naked, even in the electro-sleaze bangers – just as he chides himself in another highlight, in “The Waiting Game”: “You’ve been a little over-honest lately.” But “Coming Up Roses” is the mission statement – the “Matilda” or “Cherry” of this album, the song that sets the bar for all the others.
He sings a stunningly intimate ballad in the style of “Fine Line,” only piano and orchestra, with renowned conductor Jules Buckley. Two scared people finding a moment together and admitting their insecurities. “Just for tonight let’s go hangover chasing,” he sings over the longing pizzicato strings, “and I’ll talk your ear off about why it’s safe/As I fumble my words and fall flat on my face through the truth.”
Doubts instead of answers
These lovers find no answers here – just a moment to feel a little less alone. “We’ll see out the night with your head on my chest, me and you,” he sings. They worry about whether they are saying too much to each other, or too little, or the wrong thing. “Does all of this seem to be bringing us closer?” he asks. “Or am I back-seating your life? Judging while you drive?” Two hearts tearing down their walls, fighting the urge to stage the scene like a movie, struggling to communicate – even if that just means staying in silence together.
The song ends with the album’s most painfully haunting moment: after the orchestral interlude, Harry returns and sighs “There’s only me and you” before wordlessly singing along with the strings. Even without a single lyric, it seems like his deepest possible confession.
In his recent Runners World interview with legendary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Harry describes his fascination with his characters. “When you write about sex and masculinity, your characters aren’t all experts at sex – there are a lot of scenes of them fumbling around. There’s an innocence to them, as well as vulnerability, and shame. That has definitely changed the way I view being masculine and being vulnerable.” That’s exactly where he is in “Coming Up Roses.” The power is all in that awkward shiver in his voice.
Marathon instead of red carpet
Since his blockbuster “Harry’s House” four years ago, he has popped up in some unexpected places – but always as far away from the celebrity rat race as possible. Not at a film premiere or a fashion gala, but in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, just at the right time for the announcement of the new pope. Or he surprises everyone by running the Tokyo Marathon – on the night of the Oscars. Quite a move, especially since Harry completed the marathon in less time than the Oscars took. A few months later he ran the Berlin Marathon in 2:59:13 – a new personal best.
In a typically eccentric move, he celebrated his new album in the pages of Runners World in conversation with his literary idol Murakami. As he once told Rolling Stone, he spent his 25th birthday reading “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” “I had a very Murakami-esque birthday because I ended up staying alone in Tokyo,” he said in 2019. “I went to this cafe. And I sat there and drank tea and read for five hours.”
Harry spoke openly about the personal turmoil behind the new album – as he turned 30 and fled the spotlight. He found refuge in Berlin, dancing in the electronic clubs as an anonymous reveler among many. “Over the years, I’ve had to say no to everything I’ve been invited to,” he said, “whether it was a friend’s birthday, a trip somewhere wonderful, an opening. I eventually wondered if I was saying no because I was really busy, or because it was more comfortable than saying yes. When you close yourself off to protect yourself from people who might bring negativity into your life, you also miss out on positive experiences.”
The Yes Say Album
“Kissco” is his yes-saying album, with a grown-up streak for disobedience. In his liner notes he dedicates it “for those who helped me know when to say NO, when to say YES. For all my friends to dance to.” But the disco in the album title is less a set of musical rules than a spiritual search – the dance floor as a place where you escape from yourself and dissolve into the collective pulse of the crowd.
“Harry’s House” was a concept album about home – finding and creating the place where you belong – but this one is about leaving home and moving on. At that time he was guided by the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world.” But four years after the construction of Harry’s House, “Kiss” is about going out into the world and getting lost in it.
“Running is a conversation with myself,” said Harry in the Murakami interview – and he has these conversations throughout “Kiss.” The album is full of songs about letting go and liberating, created with an intimate circle of longtime companions: Tyler Johnson and executive producer Kid Harpoon. There’s a lot of eighties electropop in the music – Depeche Mode, Prince, New Order, Talking Heads, plus a synth marimba solo that would make Tears for Fears proud. Also LCD Soundsystem, whose live shows were an inspiration for this album. The dance bangers are full of ecstatic discharge, like the single “Aperture,” “Ready Steady Go” and “Season Two Weight Loss.” “Dance No More” explodes with dirty synth squiggles over the Chic-like bass line, along with the chant: “Get your feet wet! Respect your mother!”
Deeper with every listen
As with all Harry Styles albums, the depth only unfolds when you carry the songs with you over time. “Are You Listening Yet” finds him deep in an existential crisis à la “As It Was.” He recites a grim diagnosis: “God knows your life is on the brink/And your therapist’s well fed,” before describing the kind of meltdown that leaves you ignoring the therapist’s actual words, forgetting the mantra and seeking solace in “the fix of all fixes, un-intimate sex.” “Pop” is the song of a man who loves pop – as music, as mass communication, as a reason to strut around in feather boas and sparkly pants – but who has remained allergic to the celebrity hustle that he outgrew in his teenage years. Significantly, “pop” in this song is the sound of a bubble bursting.
Parts of the album were recorded at Hansa Studios
“Coming Up Roses” links up with “Paint By Numbers,” the album’s other ballad, in which he sings more openly than ever about the price of fame. “They put an image in your head and now you’re stuck with it,” he complains – a reflection of his own boy band experience. It’s haunting to hear him sing: “You’re the luckiest, oh the irony/Holding the weight of the American children whose hearts you break.” This is One Direction’s “Freedom ’90.” (When he pleads “I’m not even 33,” one can’t help but be reminded of his late bandmate Liam Payne, who died in 2024 at just 31.) But Harry finds his way out in the closing “Carla’s Song,” with its urgent synthpop hook, the realization that everything he needs is waiting within himself: “It’s all waiting just for you.” An inspiring ending to the album.
There’s a long pop tradition in which teenage songwriting prodigies take emotional stock as they approach their thirties. So it’s hard to resist calling this album “Harry’s Hejira” – like his heroine Joni Mitchell in 1976, at 32, he’s escaping the starmaking machine and cranking up the bass on a journey to find his adult self. Instead of driving through the desert, he explores Berlin’s nightlife – but in both cases it’s the refuge of being on the road, even if it’s obviously the least Joni-like music he’s ever made. (No Dulcimer on the dancefloor.) And since Bowie is another of Styles’ heroes, the album perhaps calls to mind another Londoner who turned his back on LA to hide in Berlin – parts of the album were recorded at Hansa Studios, the same place where Bowie recorded “Heroes.”
Vulnerable, unprotected, undisguised
On a dance floor you can hide – in a way that is not possible with two people. That’s what makes “Coming Up Roses” so powerful: his voice, frontal and exposed. It’s the opposite of the “un-intimate sex” he mourns earlier on the album; they are two people who stop trying to solve the mystery of it all and surrender to the moment. “Kissco” is a whole album about saying yes instead of no – but “Coming Up Roses” is the most complex yes on the album. It’s Harry Styles as soulful and exposed as he’s ever been – and sums up everything he has to say on “Kiss All the Time.”
