Enter the Void: On Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, Harry Styles remains a blank slate

On his fourth studio album, Styles commits to what has emerged as the defining trait of his music: a carefully curated collage of stylistic gestures, rarely explored in depth and never quite coalescing into a clear artistic vision.

Harry Styles’ fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, is an expensive-sounding, tasteful affair. Recorded with regular collaborators Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, it’s made up of polished pop songs that play with modular synths, lush orchestration, scuzzy guitar licks and funky basslines. Sure, there are fewer obvious hits than on previous outings – perhaps only Aperture, Pop and Ready, Steady, Go! feel fit for regular radio rotation – and the lyrics, always Styles’ biggest weakness, are sometimes nonsensical to the point of incoherence. But, overall, it’s a competently produced album. Why, then, does it feel so hollow?

It is becoming difficult to ignore the pattern that has emerged. For all his stature as one of the world’s biggest male pop stars, Styles seems to have approached fame with a single guiding instinct: surround himself with culturally resonant sounds and identities while revealing as little of himself as possible. His deliberately vague lyricism, coupled with an unwillingness to dive into specifics in interviews, makes him a blank slate, one onto whom audiences can project whatever they want: he can be a pop star, a rock god, a queer icon, a soft boi singer-songwriter, boyfriend material, or the most authentic artist working today. 

Instead, his ambiguity, soft sonic gestures and manufactured signals of good taste – aligning himself with legacy artists like Stevie Nicks or Joni Mitchell, or curating this year’s Southbank Centre’s Meltdown Festival, for example – give the illusion of something interesting, but one that never graduates to genuine excitement. It is just attractive smoke and mirrors.

The closest Styles comes to revealing anything resembling a point of view is through his references. His self-titled debut album was brazenly indebted to 70s rock ’n’ roll swagger, the lead single Sign of the Times a little like ‘Baby’s First Bowie’. His subsequent albums – informed by the likes of Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac, breezy Laurel Canyon folk, 80s pop and Prince – felt like an artist developing in real time. None of the sounds were his, exactly, but it was interesting to see him trying them on for size, even if they often felt like costumes.

Four albums in, however, and Styles now feels lost in the references he’s playing with. In interviews, he has discussed how, while recording Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, he was inspired by leisurely coffee breaks in Rome, running, late-night partying at Berlin nightclubs, and watching LCD Soundsystem. He has invoked Floating Points, Jamie xx, Simon & Garfunkel, Four Tet and even The Durutti Column. “I was starting to go out dancing a lot more,” he told Radio 1’s Greg James, “so I was hearing a lot of different types of music.” 

If you squint, you can just about make all this out on Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. Lead single Aperture does echo James Murphy’s revivalist dance-punk (think Sound of Silver more than Tribulations), as well as the woozy electronics spread across Jamie xx’s In Colour. The fizzing, discordant Season 2 Weight Loss, a song about transformation and the pressures of fan expectations, is reminiscent of Radiohead’s first proper excursion into electronic music, Kid A, its jittering synths, lonely piano and tumbling percussion creating a similar chilly atmosphere. And there’s nods to the watery pianos from The Durutti Column’s Future Perfect buried in American Girls, although Styles seems hesitant to lean into the languid quality of Vini Reilly’s sleek electronica, instead opting for a cumbersome, if crowd-pleasing, stadium-sized singalong chorus. 

On several occasions, Styles pointed to nights spent in Berghain as a core new influence, and in an interview with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami in Runner’s World, he said he listens to DJs Fadi Mohem and Ben Klock while out jogging. None of that seems to have bled into Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, though. Techno, this album is not. 

Instead, he’s tried to capture something looser: a vibe. When discussing LCD Soundsystem, he said he wanted to make music that felt like being in the crowd at one of their gigs. Likewise, while speaking to Tom Power, he explained the objective of Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally was to share with fans the freedom he experienced going out: “It’s me saying, ‘Experiencing life in this way is amazing, and I encourage you to go and do that for yourself’.”

Aside from the chorus of Aperture, that transcendence never quite materialises. More often, as evidenced by Ready, Steady, Go! and the Bruno Mars-esque Dance No More, Styles mostly retreats to the safety of the guitar-led, funk-driven stadium pop that typified 2022’s Harry’s House. As a result, all his talk of dance music and the numerous muso-approved influences begin to sound like hot air – inviting yes, but with little beneath the surface.

@hitsradiouk HARRY STYLES IS BRINGING BACK CLUBBING🪩‼️ #harrystyles #clubbing #aperture ♬ original sound – Hits Radio UK

There is, of course, safety in lightly sexing up a proven formula. It speaks to Styles’ fear of exposure, though, that he’s unable to fully commit. He has previously suggested that his experience as a member of One Direction, where he and his bandmates were “encouraged to give a lot of ourselves away,” has left him guarded about sharing more intimate details about his life. Perhaps being the product of a manufactured boyband also embedded an understandable instinct for risk aversion and, moreover, self-preservation.

Given Styles’ success – this summer he will play a record-breaking 12 nights at Wembley Stadium and 30 shows at Madison Square Garden – this approach has certainly served him commercially. At the time of writing, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally is on track to be this week’s UK number one album. As he sings on the strumming ballad Paint By Numbers, the penultimate track from his new album: “Oh, what a gift it is to be noticed/But it’s nothing to do with me.” 

Still, with Styles so absent from his own music, his identity as an artist remains frustratingly out of reach. His songs, filled with tasteful nods and carefully curated moods, rarely feel fully inhabited. Until he can learn to truly embody the work he’s making, Styles will struggle, as he preaches on Aperture, to ever truly let the light in.