Harry Styles ‘Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally’ review: Euphoric joy on the dancefloor

After Harry Styles wrapped up his global tour in August 2023, he took some time away from the limelight, as fans attempted to deduce his next moves. He was spotted in the
most unexpected places: running the Berlin Marathon in under three hours. Waiting in St Peter’s Square to see Pope Leo XIV for the first time. Getting in a fan’s car and valiantly failing to help them parallel park.

These were born from what he recently described as a personal mantra to say “yes” to everything, and it’s this new-found freedom that shapes the backbone of his excellent fourth album. It’s eclectic, impossible to pigeonhole and, ultimately, all the better for it.

Things kick off with ‘Aperture’, the slow-burning, house-flecked number which birthed this era and was inspired by trips Styles took to see LCD Soundsystem in London and Madrid. “It was just so joyous,” he has explained. But this track proves to be an outlier.
Shades of LCD certainly can be heard, but they’re far clearer elsewhere. That’s certainly true of ‘American Girls’, a slow but infectious earworm anchored by thudding synths that
aren’t too dissimilar from LCD’s 2010 hit ‘Dance Yrself Clean’.

What unites most of these songs is the sense that Styles has emerged with a far bigger sound than he’s ever delivered. Rumoured trips to Berlin techno club Berghain while recording the album at the city’s Hansa Studios helped in no small part with that. “Just being able to be in a crowd and be with friends and be in spaces feeling safe enough to, you
know, get a little loose and dance and stuff,” he recently reflected.

The pounding ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ therefore aims for big beats and lands successfully, while ‘Season 2 Weight Loss’ – laden with pounding drums from The Smile’s Tom Skinner, one of several backing vocals from Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell, and deep techno vibes – marks one of the most experimental moments of his solo career. Both of these feel like an attempt to lean into dance.

There is, however, quiet beauty on the dance floor too. ‘Coming Up Roses’ is the big weepy of the album. The only song solely written by Styles himself, it’s a beautiful rumination on fears about going too far, too soon in a relationship (“We’ll see out the night with your head on my chest”). It almost makes up for some of the record’s other, frustratingly oblique lyrics. By the time it ascends to a heavenly plane with an orchestra and gospel choir, the sound is not unlike the symphonic highs of late-era Beatles.

And then, as things near their end, a final almighty flourish arrives in ‘Pop’, a slinking retro tune laden with the unforgettable lusty lyric of “just me on my knees”, and ‘Dance No More’, a Daft Punk-indebted dance banger which explodes with an almighty shout of
“Respect your mother!” In leaning into dance-floor-primed sounds, Styles has offered a record that pays clear tribute to dance music’s trailblazers, but also provides a bold new step in his solo superstardom. It is the perfect soundtrack for this summer, when Styles’ fans will head to his huge Wembley Stadium shows to, well, disco, occasionally. But with this record’s uniting power, you wouldn’t rule out a few kisses either…