One widely held view of Harry Styles is that he’s a cool guy who makes boring music. What if he’s actually a boring guy who makes cool music?
That’s the prospect raised by the 32-year-old pop star’s new album, “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.,” which came out Friday and immediately racked up more than 60 million streams on Spotify — the biggest album opening of 2026 so far. It arrives four years after Styles’ previous LP, “Harry’s House,” another instant blockbuster that topped the charts in both the U.S. and the U.K., was named album of the year at both the Grammys and the Brit Awards and powered a sold-out tour that crisscrossed the globe for nearly 24 months. (Among the tour’s engagements: a headlining gig at Coachella and a 15-night stay at Inglewood’s Kia Forum.)
Yet to hear Styles tell it, this former member of the mega-successful British boy band One Direction has been trying since then to live like a regular bloke. In September he ran the Berlin Marathon under an assumed name — OK, kind of a regular bloke — and he’s spoken wistfully of seeking out the anonymity of dark nightclubs in order to reclaim the experience of dancing among strangers.
“Spending so much time onstage, it’s really easy to forget what it feels like to be in the middle of a crowd,” he told John Mayer in an interview on Mayer’s radio show.
Styles seems to have remembered the sensation on the beat-heavy “Kiss All the Time,” his fourth solo LP. Again and again here he evokes a kind of blissful abandon, the more unself-conscious the better; he keeps singing about getting lost, as he puts it in “Dance No More,” where “there’s no difference in between the tears and the sweat.”
Having found his way back into the spotlight, he goes on: “Move it to the side with your hands up high / Keep your customer satisfied and live your life.” It’s a startlingly pragmatic way to describe the work of pop stardom, as though Styles has clocked the oily charmers who broke out while he was lying low — think of Benson Boone, think of Role Model, think especially of Sombr — and concluded that the parts of the job he doesn’t like are best left to them.
Which of course you can look at as a textbook fourth-album play by a survivor of the bruising teen-idol complex — Styles’ contribution to a reckoning-with-celebrity canon that includes Beyoncé’s “4” (to name a high point) and Justin Timberlake’s “Man of the Woods” (to name a low).
“Oh, what a gift it is to be noticed,” he sings in “Paint By Numbers,” one of a handful of acoustic ballads that pepper “Kiss All the Time’s” thumping dance tracks, “But it’s nothing to do with me.”
Well, Harry, if you say so.
Still, there’s something genuine-seeming about Styles’ longing to retreat. He’s always been a paradox: a source of endless charisma about whom it’s virtually impossible to discern anything concrete. With his first three albums of glittery throwback soft rock, the rap on Styles among a certain class of tastemaker was that he’d cultivated a squishy woke-heartthrob persona by sanding the rough edges of the transgressors who preceded him.
And indeed Styles remains strangely blank, as in the music video for the new record’s “American Girls” — a knowing if cutesy riff on showbiz artificiality — and in an excruciatingly dull interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe.
Yet the singer’s pivot to club music feels like an honest solution to the problem of his reluctance (or his inability) to fill in a picture of himself. “It’s a little bit complicated when they put an image in your head and now you’re stuck with it,” he sings in “Paint by Numbers,” which pretty handily demonstrates how lightweight the introspection is here. That’s one of the easier-to-parse lyrics on “Kiss All the Time”; more often, he’s singing about getting your feet wet or about “a baby sleeping upon a candy bar” — and doing it with his voice washed in reverb, as though he’s just one more instrument in a mix meant to rouse not to illuminate.
Working with his trusty producers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, Styles builds gorgeously detailed grooves like the blissed-out gospel-house “Aperture”; “Are You Listening Yet?” (Talking Heads gone indie-sleaze); and “Season 2 Weight Loss,” which places drummer Tom Skinner’s live playing amid an intricate latticework of vintage-synth blips. Throughout the LP, the objects of Styles’ admiration — New Order, middle-era Radiohead, LCD Soundsystem — are almost comically obvious. But the obviousness is kind of endearing.
Styles’ submission to the beat on “Kiss All the Time” will be difficult to maintain as the pop-star machinery revs inevitably to life behind it. Just two days after the album dropped, Netflix released a concert film that opens with Styles addressing the audience in murmuring voice-over; in May he’ll launch a series of extended residencies in a handful of cities around the world (including New York, where he’s set to play no fewer than 30 nights at Madison Square Garden).
I’m still eager to see him try.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
