Billy Joel had just stepped into his twenties and was touring Europe when he found his estranged father in Vienna. It was there that he learnt about his half-brother, Alexander, and about how his paternal family had been killed in Auschwitz. The encounter led to the song Vienna. Perhaps it brought him a sense of release; perhaps it was about accepting the transitions in his life. Either way, it is a reminder that some of the most enduring music comes from moments when life quietly shifts beneath one’s feet.
It is this same acceptance of change — less dramatic, perhaps, but no less meaningful — that runs through the opening track Aperture from Harry Styles’s latest album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. It’s best you know what you don’t/ Aperture lets the light in, sings the 32-year-old, with an impish charm that lives up to his surname.
The album sees him probing and reshaping his identity, both as an individual and as an artist. Sonically, it leans towards the dance-punk revivalism of LCD Soundsystem, delivering life’s ironies with a quiet, almost understated sincerity. There is, in fact, something distinctly British about this gaze — the ability to find profundity in the everyday — the sort of perspective that would not feel out of place in a book by the late British photographer Martin Parr, whom Styles invited into his life in 2024.
The art of observing
Always guarded about his personal life, Styles let his guard slip when Parr photographed him at home, off duty. For Parr, who died last year at the age of 73, everyday life was a kind of arena — not for spectacle, but for truth. While others chased the grand and the dramatic, Parr lingered on the periphery, capturing what quietly unfolded.
In the summer of 2024, Styles was in Italy, navigating a transitional phase. He wanted “to stop working, be settled for a while”, as he told The Times, London. When Parr arrived, the photographs from this period were never meant for public consumption. Yet working with him “felt like a fun opportunity”. When the images were eventually shared, Styles was keen to have them published. It subtly reshaped his outlook — particularly upon learning that even days before his death, Parr was still out in the mountains, camera in hand, doing what he loved.
Here, then, is a musician who can still make an album release feel like an event. Record shops across the UK opened at midnight — or as early as they could manage — to let fans pick up physical copies. Yes, those still exist, and yes, there remains a devoted audience for them. Such is his appeal that Styles was named curator of this year’s Meltdown Festival at London’s Southbank Centre — an honour previously held by Patti Smith, Yoko Ono and David Bowie.
Given his resonance with younger audiences, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. was always destined for chart success. The only question was scale. The album racked up 430,000 equivalent units in its first week. With 291,000 copies sold — including 186,000 on vinyl, a record for male artistes since Luminate began tracking such sales in 1991 — it reached number one without needing the crutch of streaming. He has now become the first solo artiste to debut at number one with his first four albums — the earlier three being Harry Styles, Fine Line and Harry’s House — since Alicia Keys achieved the feat between 2001 and 2007.
A quieter confidence
This is not an album built on obvious ‘bangers’ in the mould of As It Was or Watermelon Sugar. Instead, mid-tempo house rhythms carry the record, keeping listeners engaged without clamour. The music is restrained, almost deliberately so — much like many aspects of British life.
It is not a star-driven album in the conventional sense. At times, Styles’s voice recedes into the arrangement, allowing the grooves and low-frequency pulses to take centre stage. Here, experience edges out ego.
Tracks such as Aperture, American Girls, Ready, Steady, Go! and Are You Listening Yet? nod towards LCD Soundsystem, Radiohead and the synth-heavy textures of the 1980s.
Meanwhile, The Waiting Game and Carla’s Song introduce a disco sheen, nudging Styles into a slightly different register. His affection for the Sixties surfaces in Paint by Numbers, with its acoustic guitar, French horns and mellotron-like textures. Oh, what a gift it is to be noticed/ But it’s nothing to do with me…, he sings, before drifting into a reflection on learning, repetition and the slow bleed of colour beyond rigid lines.
Another standout is The Waiting Game, with its note of romantic self-sabotage: You found/ Someone to put your arms around/ Playing the waiting game/ But it all adds up to nothing.
One of the album’s strengths lies in its production. Kid Harpoon (Tom Hull), who has worked on some of this century’s biggest pop songs — including Miley Cyrus’s Flowers and Styles’s own Watermelon Sugar — lends his touch here. The album was shaped across Berlin’s Hansa Studios, London’s Abbey Road, and Laurel Canyon in California, where Hull has lived for the past decade.
It is a far cry from Styles’s One Direction days, when the weight of sound could be shared across the group. Now, the responsibility — and the freedom — is entirely his.
Italy, in many ways, sits at the heart of this transformation. It became meaningful to him when he drove from London to Rome during the Covid years. The city taught him to slow down — to sit in a café, to savour a coffee, to simply be.
“I was suddenly learning, through my friends, that eating a meal is more than just sitting down and refuelling,” he told The Times, London. “I realised the pleasure in just being in the moment…. The Romans are the best at that — that’s their speciality.”
Around the same time, his sister Gemma had a baby, making him an uncle. Had this happened earlier, he would have been on tour. Instead, he was present — watching his niece grow up. Life, as he puts it, felt real.
That sense of grounding has made change easier. He no longer keeps Instagram on his phone. “I feel so much healthier in my relationship with the world that I’m stepping back into,” he said recently.
Having worked to a relentless schedule since the age of 16, part of his new routine is learning not to work all the time. It involves doing things he enjoys — like running a marathon, which he completed in September.
All of this seems to have restored a sense of play. At a time when pop stars are resorting to every trick in the book to stay relevant — even repackaging old material — Styles has delivered an album that does not plead for attention. It simply suggests: do as you please. And if that is not quite enough, one might yet find themselves debating whether the album’s title is grammatically sound — is it about kissing constantly and going to the disco occasionally, or something more mischievous? Either way, it may well send you back to Virginia Woolf — a writer who, after all, had rather firm views on punctuation. Go figure.