“You gotta get your feet wet,” sings Harry Styles on “Dance No More,” a track off his new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. Like many of the project’s lyrics, it’s less of a command to the audience as it is self-directed. Styles knows there’s no catharsis without immersion, and on his new album, he is in desperate need of release.
That release arrives most powerfully on tracks like “Season 2 Weight Loss,” where a frenetic breakbeat gives way to something raw and urgent, or “Pop,” where the rush of new love tips into near-panic. These are the moments that define Kiss All the Time, and Styles is never more compelling than when he’s crashing out.
Styles’ first new album since 2022’s Harry’s House promises transcendence through dance music. It’s certainly a feature of opening song — and the only preview of the album ahead of release — “Aperture.” Throughout the five-minute track, Styles lets a kaleidoscopic beat and ecstatic hook do much of the talking, building from hushed intimacy to a choir-laden refrain that feels genuinely euphoric. It sets a clear expectation: Harry Styles is going to the dance floor and he’s taking us with him.
Related Video
But Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally — true to its title — is only occasionally that album. More often, it’s a record about the push and pull of romance, the forming and dissolving of relationships, and a restless search for something Styles can’t quite name. The disco is real, but so is Styles’ existential crisis.
Sonically, though, his new album does not function as ‘Harry Styles does a house music pivot a la Beyoncé’s Renaissance.‘ Most of it aligns with Styles’ now standard rose-colored pop rock, but this time, there’s a heavy emphasis on the kind of nervy, bass-heavy indie rock that ruled the late 2000s and early 2010s. Traces of Franz Ferdinand’s charged guitar pop show up on “Are You Listening Yet?”; Two Door Cinema Club and Vampire Weekend both haunt closing track “Carla’s Song”; and The 1975’s self-serious gloss is all over “Taste Back” and “American Girls” (though Styles wears it with considerably less irony).
Styles mentioned that a cathartic experience at an LCD Soundsystem show helped form the basis of Kiss All the Time’s musical direction, and there are definitely traces of James Murphy’s work swimming around the instrumentation and production. The synth voicings often buzz at the top of the mix, especially on highlight “Season 2 Weight Loss,” one of the album’s most thrilling and chaotic moments. It feels like a textural nod to LCD and Crystal Castles, but the song’s breakbeat, mammoth bass, and primal urgency bring it into a whole new arena.
While not necessarily a “dance” album through and through, the rhythm and bass are key components on Kiss All the Time. These tracks have a tendency to simply throb, and nearly every song has a bassline with a life of its own; it’s incredibly prominent and dripping with sleaze on “Ready, Steady, Go!,” it’s almost cartoonishly large on “Taste Back” and “Pop,” and it’s one of the most expressive aspects of “Aperture.” The drums on the album are predominantly done by Tom Skinner, known for his work in The Smile and Sons of Kemet, and they also have a considerable impact on the album’s overall sound. They’re particularly prominent on “Season 2 Weight Loss,” which features a viscerally satisfying moment where the groove collapses from a frenetic breakbeat to a propulsive four-on-the-floor rhythm.
But unfortunately, not all the songs are quite as riveting and electric as “Season 2 Weight Loss” and “Pop.” The ballad-adjacent tracks “Coming Up Roses” and “Paint By Numbers” are undeniably pretty, acoustic-led numbers, but they don’t fit in the same world as other tracks on the record. Styles, alongside producer Kid Harpoon, mines some of the tension between the natural and the digital; it’s surprising that an album with throbbing, mechanistic beats and anxious synths has such openly baroque moments of violin and symphonic orchestration.
More than the sonic tension, though, the most apparent conflict in Kiss All the Time is one of romance. Styles is preoccupied with relationships at every stage. “Ready, Steady, Go!” is about the urgent, physical rush of a new lover; “Pop” takes place further along in the new love story, where the stakes of potential heartbreak have gotten so high that it feels like the world could fall apart at any moment. Harry perpetually looks for love on “The Waiting Game” but just can’t find it; on “Season 2 Weight Loss” and “Coming Up Roses,” he laments the death of a relationship.
There are a few lyrical moments that stick out, like when Styles sings “You’ve had your tummy tickled/ Are you listening?” on “Are You Listening Yet?” and “Does all of this seem to be bringing us closer?/ Or am I backseating your life, judging while you drive?” on “Coming Up Roses.” But the album’s most arresting words arrive when the stakes are highest and Styles lays bare amidst the action. “You want a piece or nothing at all,” he declares on “Season 2 Weight Loss,” and it lands like a gut punch precisely because the song around it is so unhinged and desperate.
Believe it or not, Kiss All the Time’s most transcendent moments aren’t the ones where he’s fully committed to the dance floor, they’re the ones where his old romantic instincts collide with this new, restless energy — and that friction is where the magic is. “Pop” and “Season 2 Weight Loss” work not because they’re clean pivots, but because they sound like Styles is being pulled in two directions at once.
There’s plenty of standard, perfectly safe Harry Styles fare — enough to satisfy die-hard fans and casual listeners. But every so often, he lets the seams show, resulting in some of the most thrilling songs of his career. He could certainly afford to let his music get even more unhinged. “You gotta get your feet wet,” he tells us. Next time, maybe he’ll dive headfirst.
Editor’s note: This article was intended to run with a B grade, but due to a mistake, briefly appeared with a B- grade. The article has since been corrected.
