A little more than halfway through this wonderfully strange, often beautiful and consistently fascinating album, things get downright freaky – at least musically speaking. After using epic amounts of bass, a gospel choir, a brave drummer who gets wickedly wicked whether it’s a thumper or a ballad, a wide range of rhythm tricks and tracks, acoustic and electric guitars and all sorts of pulses, washes and rinses, Harry Styles shrugs and asks: Why not everything at once?
“Season 2 Weight Loss” begins with electrical noise – something that comes to life, plugging in, ramping up or feeding back – before keyboards that would be at home on a Kraftwerk album echo over a few seconds of silence. What begins next sounds like the chopped up breakbeats of drum and bass, except that the beats keep hitting in strange places, as if they’re hiding from the tempo instead of driving it forward. And when the bass comes to life, it’s slightly off-beat, like having three tabs open in the browser, each with a different song.
Styles addresses someone who could have been in his arms but keeps hesitating – “Do you love me now?” he asks, not for the first and not for the last time on “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.”, searching for something that always remains just out of reach. The music builds and builds – carousel keys chasing a chorus of voices in the distance, the drums pounding like someone about to kick down a door – until, as if a meditation bell has emptied the room, everything stops and Styles can sing: “You’ve got to sit yourself down sometimes.” And then, once the commandment is given, everything starts again.
If that sounds a bit strange – yes, it is. It’s also typical of the way this album subverts expectations. Styles spent 22 months touring for his second and third albums, 2019’s Fine Line and 2022’s Harry’s House, finishing the last of his 169 shows in July 2023. After that, he said he wanted to spend time on the audience side and again feel what it feels like to stand in the dark, lost in the crowd, dancing and singing with strangers.
The music he created with producer Kid Harpoon – a key collaborator on Fine Line and Harry’s House – reflects this desire. Like the collaborative works of the past, it ignores definitions and erases all possible boundaries: rock-pop, organic-synthetic, written-jammed, authentic-constructed. And it is based on freedom of all kinds – sexual, of course, but also on a wandering curiosity that plunders the past without caring about history.
Sensual instead of star-oriented
But “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” is more sensual and less star-oriented than the music they’ve made before. Styles’ voice is sometimes subordinate to the track, filtered or buried in the mix. And while there are hooks – lots of them – they sometimes take a backseat to low-frequency thumps, grooves, shimmies and shakes that are both sonically and erotically dirty. This is music that is more about being than meaning, about experience rather than ego.
“Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” opens with four real bangers: the trance-heavy “Aperture”; “American Girls,” with a biting low end that sounds like it was ripped from an 8-bit video game; “Ready, Steady, Go!”, which combines a chic bass line with an airplane whoosh effect, as if a DJ were playing the same track on two slightly offset turntables; and “Are You Listening Yet?”, where heavy 2010s vibes are reminiscent of both LCD Soundsystem and Stargate synth bounce productions for Rihanna. There is also “Dance No More”, an 80s synth-fest based on the no-parking-on-the-dance-floor principle, with chorus shouts of “Respect your mother!” that evoke drag ball culture.
And yet “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” not really Styles’ dance album, despite the Glitter Ball album cover. Tracks like “The Waiting Game” and “Carla’s Song” are pop songs in disco clothes. “Coming Up Roses” leaves the dance floor for a ballad about a night on the slopes chasing a hangover, played by a 39-piece orchestra that functions less as a string section than as a band. And Styles hasn’t given up his sense of melodic ’60s classicism.
“Paint by Numbers” finds him exploring the joys and perils of his pop idol persona while playing acoustic guitar and supporting French horns and a Mellotron-esque keyboard. “Oh what a gift it is to be noticed, but it’s nothing to do with me,” he sings. “It’s a little bit complicated when they put an image in your head and now you’re stuck with it.” The theme also seems to concern him in “Pop,” which rolls along on an electro bounce and a cool, rococo synth melody and could be about music, orgasm, drugs, or all of the above. Styles mentions daytime intravenous use and missing rolling papers before singing, “It’s just me/On my knees/Squeaky clean fantasy/It’s meant to be pop.”
Search for light and enlightenment
But on most of “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” Harry Styles is a seeker who wants to find or give enlightenment, ecstasy, love or light. The album begins with Styles singing about letting the light in on “Aperture,” and ends with “Carla’s Song,” where he finds the light not in someone else’s eyes, but in the gold those eyes see – as if his own empathy and sensitivity – not sex and love – is what he’s been looking for all along.
In between there are tingling bellies, friends flirting with “the wrong guys” and finding support in each other, non-intimate sex, a forgotten mantra, the desire to know what safety is, and an almost psychedelic sense of adventure. “If you know, then you know,” Styles sings on the final track, sounding like he’s coming down from a trip or leaving the most exclusive club in the world after a three-day party. “If you don’t, then you don’t.” The melody rolls like the tides, the beats reach skyward, and he shares one final blessing: “It’s all waiting there for you.”
