On his new album, Harry Styles finally shatters the teen idol fishbowl

Harry Styles, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally

★★★★

From his first release after One Direction’s split, 2017’s Sign of the Times, comparisons have been made between Harry Styles and his idol, David Bowie. Styles has earned a reputation as a non-conformist – a progressive artist who challenges traditional ideas of masculinity and sexuality, and a subversively kaleidoscopic fashion icon. His music, however, has not broken the mould in the same way.

On his fourth solo album, Styles stretches for something different, something brave and weird and singular. The result is an album that overthrows any expectations you might have about what a “Harry Styles album” sounds like, or what you might expect from a well-polished megastar of Styles’ ilk.

The first single and opening track, Aperture, is a clear statement of intent: a five-minute electronic slow burn of bouncing synths and intimate vocals, building into a euphoric crescendo of barrelling beats and pinging laser blasts. It’s bold, experimental, and most surprisingly, hardly radio-friendly.

Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally can be a dizzying experience: it’s a refractory, futuristic journey across galaxies of genres, sounds and personalities. It bounds off in any number of directions, with Styles a pinball working to understand his place in the machine. He’s trying on masks and outfits, singing from behind closed doors as he searches through an endless costume box for his true self.

Styles joined One Direction at just 16 years old – he’s been famous for over half his life, living in the spotlight of an adoring, but obsessive, public. On Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, he shatters the fishbowl. Unbound by the conventions of pop, he goes on a cosmic vision quest through identity, celebrity and the bizarre loneliness of being one of the most recognisable people in the world.

On Ready, Steady, Go!, he tries on the dirty jacket of a scuzzy indie rocker, a propulsive cacophony of dispirited vocals and fuzz. On Are You Listening Yet?, it’s a faded Hendrix-style headband, all rumbling drums, space-age guitar grooves, and a trancey refrain. A sexy, sinister undercurrent of darkness and longing swirls beneath both, recalling the disco doom of Queens of the Stone Age circa 2013, or Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino-era Arctic Monkeys.

Season 2 Weight Loss reverberates loneliness and isolation, a spacey paean spiralling into the abyss, while Pop finds him trapped in a musical vortex, his voice barely pushing through the wall of distortion. Then it’s into some retro flares for the nu-disco wonderland of Dance No More, neon and glitter and a choral back and forth radiating ’70s funkadelia.

He wears a dashing summer suit on the swoon-worthy Coming Up Roses, and a snug white T-shirt as the hopeful boy-next-door on The Waiting Game. Unfortunately, he also slips into the low-slung jeans of a mediocre popster: they don’t fit very well. American Girls is as generic as pop songs come.

Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally was written and recorded in Berlin, and the reflection of Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” is clear – an innovative and divisive reinvention of the music and persona of one of music’s greatest stars, profound and uncompromising. As the strangely beautiful coda of Carla’s Song skitters away into the unknown, it feels like an album that would have earned Styles an invitation to one of Andy Warhol’s hedonistic art parties, dancing among the beautiful and bizarre as an avant-garde movie played silently on the wall.

Harry Styles has spent the past decade establishing himself as one of the modern era’s most accomplished pop stars, but he’s never really touched the stratosphere of pop music’s greatest shapeshifting alien messiah… until now.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.