“Oh, what a gift it is to be noticed/ But it’s nothing to do with me.”
While this line comes near the end of “Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally,” Harry Styles’s first album in four years, it serves as something of a thesis—or an answer to a question Styles toys with throughout the record: How can he find himself inside the whirlwind of fame that has defined his career since 2010?
The album opens with strobing beats on “Aperture,” the first single and introduction to Styles’s disco era, released just over a month before the rest of the album. Instead of somber introspection, listeners meet Styles here on a hazy club floor. “It’s best you know what you don’t/ Aperture lets the light in,” Styles urges over the LCD Soundsystem-inspired synths. Later, he chants: “We belong together/ It finally appears it’s only love.”
Where his past pop mega-hits presented clear arguments and stories through immediately earwormy hooks, “Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally” ignores that maneuver and is far more interested in asking listeners to feel all the time and think occasionally.
While some upbeat pop tracks like “American Girls” and “Taste Back” are more reminiscent of an earlier Styles, this opacity has divided listeners, and some have found the record to be a lackluster attempt at an electro-dance album. One scathing Pitchfork review went as far as to call it “unremarkable” and “decaf dance-pop.” On social media, quippy reviewers have deemed the work shallow “retail music.” But “decaf dance-pop” as a descriptor feels inappropriate for a record whose very title asserts that it is only asking listeners to “disco occasionally.”
Styles’s somewhat subtle introspection comes on the heels of his roughly three-year retreat from the public eye. He escaped to Italy, where he was spotted in St. Peter’s Square for the announcement of Pope Leo XIV. Then he headed to Berlin, joining the club of sub-three-hour marathon runners and attending a Radiohead concert. At that show, he was able to blend into the crowd, locking eyes with strangers and belting lyrics. He credits that night with reminding him why he loves music and performing. “As a part of their audience,” he told Zane Lowe in an interview for Apple Music, “I had such a clear moment of this is why I get on stage.”
The first half of the album takes place in the lead-up to this Berlin night, with Styles reflecting on mistakes and his career up to this point. The stream-of-consciousness, anxiety-inducing mirror chant that is “Are You Listening Yet,” provides an example of this reflection. “You keep forgetting your mantra, which thoughts you had/ on your own/ Ignoring all of your friends at the end of their rope,” Styles accuses himself. Self-aware, Styles calls himself out for his own shallowness and fears of vulnerability, complemented later by a line in “The Waiting Game” where he recounts his tendency to “write a ballad with the details while skimming off the top.”
The real turning point of the album is “Season 2 Weight Loss,” where listeners wait as guitars and amps plug in and buzz to life. This is Styles returning better than he left, but still worried about that reception: “Do you love me now? Do you? Do you?/ Do I let you down?” he asks.
Styles’s reentry has come with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, including a delicious array of funky synths, a gospel choir, an unbridled drummer, acoustic and electric guitars, deep bass, keys and a 39-piece orchestra. All this exploration pays off in the most carefree track, “Dance No More,” in which the catchy line “D.J.s don’t dance no more, they said,” plays over a groovy beat. This song is Styles granting permission to be for and with his audience, if we care to grant him an Ignatian lens.
And grant him we should. Though Styles identifies more with a general sense of spirituality rather than a specific religion, themes of discernment, vocation, identity and relationship with oneself and others sew the record together. If “Dance No More” offers a sort of consolation, “Paint by Numbers” parses through the desolation of fame. Importantly, the album also arrives against the backdrop of loss. Liam Payne, Styles’s former bandmate in One Direction, passed away in 2024, and Styles grapples with his grief on this track. “A little self-compassion and a life within your means/ It’s a lifetime of picking from one or the other/ Kids with water guns/ Watch them run,” Styles sings solemnly against simple strums of an acoustic guitar.
Fans of a certain demographic easily conjure up memories of the boy band chasing each other with water bottles, balloons and water guns onstage throughout their tours. The loss of Payne—someone with such similar career DNA to that of Styles, who also “just wanted to be great,” as Styles told Lowe—pushed Styles into deeper discernment about how he goes about his work.
Throughout “Paint by Numbers”, Styles reckons with fame at such an early age, including its positives but also how disconnected the media’s image of him is from his understanding of himself. The song offers no real resolution, just 18 lines of gratitude, grief and examination.
Styles’s questions about his place in fame, this world, his career choice and if it is his true vocation is answered in the satisfying, comforting and motivating end of the record with “Carla’s Song.” Here he finally understands where his talents and the world’s needs meet. Named in a direct nod to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Kathy’s Song” the song was born from the moment Styles played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to his friend Carla for the first time. He described the moment as “watching someone see in technicolor or discover magic.”
The quirky, memorable and puzzling line “you’ve been a baby sleeping on a candy bar” suggests how much joy already exists in the world waiting for us to wake up to it. How could this metaphor not be a reminder of the ever-present joy of God who is always ready for our embrace?
With “Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally,” Styles has extracted the media-made image of pop star Harry from his sense of self and music. The impact of the mixed reviews are secondary here to Styles’ pursuit of finding his own love of music again. Rather than seeking commercial success, this record seems to revel in the experience of making music for music’s sake. “I know what you like, I know what you really like/ I know what you like, you can hear it anytime,” Styles chants softly in the building post-chorus of “Carla’s Song.”
The steady beat pulses into a crescendo of drums that guarantees a major moment for his fans to sing and dance together on his upcoming “Together, Together” residency tour. Hopefully, Styles will find himself dancing with them. As he advises: “If you must join a movement, make sure there’s dancing.”
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