On his new album, Harry Styles is living his best life

We all grow up eventually – even former boy band stars. The title of Harry Styles’s fourth solo album implies he is a man living his best life. Much of Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally is concerned with feeling loved-up and frisky, or lighting up the dancefloor. After the 2022 record Harry’s House turned the former teen heartthrob into an even bigger solo artist, he has consciously placed pleasure and play at the heart of its successor. It is a strobe-lit 12-track record you could subtitle “what Styles did next” – and punctuate with an eyebrow-raised emoji.

On Ready, Steady, Go! Styles sings of a nighttime encounter. A joyous rave workout makes good on the promise of the disco ball on the album’s cover. But though he is “skipping sleep”, it’s not necessarily to go clubbing.

A song titled Pop toys with genre, and packs in even more mischief. “A squeaky-clean fantasy, it’s meant to be pop,” Styles sings, nodding to his One Direction era. Yet this slinky, synth-laden track finds Styles “down on his knees”. Whatever it is he’s up to, Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell would be a good fit to film the music video. “I wanted to behave, but I know I’ll do it again,” Styles elaborates, enigmatically. He has returned, after his hiatus, rejuvenated and raring to seduce.

According to recent interviews, the singer’s two-year break was supposed to help him decompress and figure out what fulfilled him away from stadium screams and never-ending photoshoots. Until Styles broke cover last December with Forever, Forever – an instrumental piano piece with a video that looked back at his two-year world tour, which finished in July 2023 – one of the world’s most famous artists had been lying relatively low, bar the odd pap shot. This album’s lead single, Aperture, is about both the opening in a camera lens, as well as the idea of letting good times in.

Those 24 months off amounted to Styles’s first meaningful break since the age of 16, when the floppy-haired contestant from Cheshire achieved instant fame on The X Factor. History has recorded what can become of boy band alumni. Styles’s former band mate Liam Payne, who died after falling from a third-floor balcony in 2024, is not mentioned on this record, but his death may well have informed some of the emotions here.

Because amid all the fun is the sound of a thirtysomething processing his fame with greater maturity and some often unexpected artistic evolutions. Who would ever have thought that the drummer on a Harry Styles record would be Tom Skinner, once of Shabaka Hutchings’s surging jazz outfit Sons of Kemet, and latterly of the Smile with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood? Styles grapples, often obliquely, with the art of being a human in his position, sometimes wagging his finger at others. Are You Listening Yet? is one of the album’s quirkier tracks, with Styles almost rapping over Skinner’s textured percussion, questioning someone else’s self-optimisation strategies.

Kiss All the Time... is not quite the wall-to-wall selection of flirtatious club bangers a surface reading might suggest, despite all the vintage disco (Dance No More) and frequent bursts of the House Gospel Choir. It’s as if Styles doesn’t know which way to go stylistically, so he meanders, musically and thematically. His warm, pensive ode to American Girls may be autobiographical (fans will be forgiven for picturing shots of Styles and the US actor Zoë Kravitz grabbing coffees hand in hand) – or alternately, a clever salvo directed at his biggest market. By contrast, the Beatlesque, Robbie Williams-tinged Paint By Numbers considers how artists copy until they’re confident enough to let the colours run.

There is more genre whiplash on Coming Up Roses, an orchestral pop track full of pizzicato strings. “I’m not devoid of an appetite,” Styles teases, though he is actually pondering the headaches that an abundance of good times brings. Two busy, successful people who want to be together try to marry up schedules and expectations. Everything is coming up roses. But which to pick is its own special torment. Maybe that’s what this fun, confusing record is about.

Photograph by Stella Blackmon