Kiss All The Time. Disco Occasionally: Harry Styles Dances To The Top

I’m an avid advocate for sitting with a new album, letting it marinate, not pressing too hard on conclusions or top selection candidates. But Harry Styles‘ fourth studio album, Kiss All The Time. Dance Occasionally, carries lighthearted optimism, which makes it an all-around triumph from the get-go, without any of the cautionary, “I’ll have to play it again to know if I really like it” twittering.

The 12-track record sparked polarising reactions with the release of the first single, ‘Aperture,’ but Styles stood by his art, committed and proud, and I ate up every single bite. ‘Aperture’ set the stakes very high as an energetic, well-defined song introducing the world to his new chapter after four years since the release of Harry’s House. The expectation lay in the unknown, but leaned towards more electronic sounds and euphoric choruses, drawing inspiration from LCD Soundsystem and Simon & Garfunkel.

Kiss All The Time. Disco Occasionally opens with the now familiar bop, ‘Aperture,’ and follows with ‘American Girls,’ which joins in as the latest single and invites us deeper into the new imagined realm of Harry Styles. It’s a gentle piano-led wave-in, gradually adding tempo and telling synths.

The rhythm-indicating base sets the tone of ‘Ready, Steady, Go!‘ welcoming Styles’ signature vocals, as the chorus climaxes into a liberating call for what’s to come, a future that is free and uncompromising. Completing the four-combo of an extremely strong and consistent album beginning is ‘Are You Listening Yet?’ The anthemic track poses the ultimate debate, head vs heart, while Styles questions himself, on well-delivered post-punk spoken word.

‘Taste Back,’ ‘The Waiting Game,’ and ‘Paint By Numbers’ are the only songs from the tracklist that did not exceed my expectations, but they’re confined to the steady Harry Styles songwriting record, harmless but did not leave any significant mark.

Kicking off the second half of the album is the redemptive ‘Season 2 Weight Loss,’ where Styles gets quite comfortable in his disco life, hoping for acceptance and love, with punchy drums courtesy of The Smile‘s Tom Skinner, and one of the three tracks featuring the sparkling backing vocals from Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell.

The star ballad of the project, and a perfect one for that matter, is ‘Coming Up Roses,’ which was originally meant to be a Christmas song, but alongside producer and long-time collaborator Kid Harpoon, it naturally turned into a confessional, yearning love song, accompanied by the House Gospel Choir and an exquisitely placed string arrangement. Styles describes it in his interview with Zane Love:“For me, it is a love song about how special something can be, and not everything has to last forever in order for it to be special.”

‘Pop’ and ‘Dance No More’ have you right where Harry Styles has intended, on the dancefloor, not analysing, but living the Kiss All The Time. Dance Occasionally musical fever dream, funky, filthily great, sweaty, and potentially the highlights of an adequately experimental, genuine, grown body of work, where Harry Styles seems and sounds the most at home within all four LPs.

Closing with an unbeatable spot-on running bpm, ‘Carla’s Song’ is the musical version of an epiphany of Styles saying yes to new adventures, answering existential questions, and reaffirming his passion to perform, paying an ode to his all-time favorite Simon & Garfunkel and his love for harmonies.

It is the most liberated we’ve experienced Harry Styles create, write, and perform, as we’ve seen in his BRITs performance of ‘Aperture’. The movement of dance is at the center stage of Kiss All The Time. Disco Occasionally, as Harry Styles says in ‘Are You Listening Yet?’ – “make sure there’s dancing,” and that is a well-preserved absolute theme for this new era and the record-breaking upcoming Together Together tour. As the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, famously says, “without music, life is a mistake,” and Harry Styles’ fourth album, Kiss All The Time. Dance Occasionally, is the latest confirmation of this theory.