After four years of silence, British popstar and global phenomenon Harry Styles has finally released a new album. Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally, is Styles’ most personal album yet, with songs that truly reflect the flair and desires he wants from life. The 12 track album contains deep and meaningful lyrics with a heavy, up-beat rhythm, and each song gives the aura of being dedicated to the feelings in life, but mainly, and most importantly, the love and joy that is experienced when we are with those we love and doing what we love, while also discussing other things such as fame and how he’s felt being in the spot light. During the making of the album, Styles lived in Rome and Berlin. He used experiences from those places to help encapsulate the events into a song.
In an interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, Styles broke down the meanings behind the lyrics to most of the album’s songs.
Styles stated that “Being able to just acknowledge when I’ve been at fault for things has also freed my writing in such a way,” which is what helped form the lyrics and meaning to the album’s opening track, “Aperture.” The song itself is based around the moment when you realize what you’ve done is wrong and accept that you have made a mistake. Rather than letting a fault drive your motivations, you move forward, and knowing what you didn’t before gives you “the space to let the light in.”
“American Girls,” the second track on the album, is admittedly a lonely song with deep and rich meaning. Styles watched as three of his closest friends got married, seeing just how much trust they had in one another and seeing the risks that were taken “to find something truly fulfilling in a way that isn’t as, like, shiny and on paper as exciting.” He wrote the song from his own perspective of watching his friends marry, stating, “watching them get married, I was like, ‘I’m single, so I’m having all the fun.’ And ‘American Girls’ is actually about watching them get married, and there just is a magic when you find the right person that you want to be with. I think watching them do that and seeing that it doesn’t come without any uncertainty, it doesn’t come without any risk.”
In December, Styles stated he wanted to try to write a festive Christmas song, though that idea only lasted two lines before he realized it was meant to be a love song. “It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done,” Styles told Lowe, “The writing of it was really something that just happened, like that was one of those that felt like it just fell out… It is a love song about how special something can be, and not everything can be, and not everything has to last forever in order for it to be special. Some of the greatest relationships in your life that teach you something don’t last forever.” The music conveys a sort of “there for a fun time, not a long time” feeling between a couple. It indicates that if maturity and dedication were present in the relationship, it could work out.
The ninth track of the album, titled “Pop,” shows the relationship Styles has had with fame and his fans. Since his days in One Direction, fans have labeled him as a womanizer. In the song, he describes how he wants to leave that “party boy persona,” but the habit is hard to kick. Styles also alludes to his bisexuality and exploring life in a different way, but instantly becomes comfortable with the sort of familiarity in it. The song “Pop” also references lyrics from his song “Cinema” on his previous album, Harry’s House, released in May of 2022, using the word in a way that relates to intimacy. In an interview with BBC Radio 1, Styles said, “I think it [pop music] can feel like ‘oh I make pop music, and therefore I have to make this’, and I think a lot of this album was exploring what I could make… Feeling like, what I’m supposed to be doing is pop, you know, I’m meant to be pop, it’s supposed to be pop. It’s a very playful thing- pop music – and so I think, like, being able to move within it was something that I wanted to explore.”
During Styles’ time in Berlin, he was able to experience some of the scene life. In his conversation with Lowe, he said, “I remember going out the first time in Berlin and standing in the middle of the dance floor and feeling so unbelievably free and safe, that I kind of just had my hands in the air and my eyes closed, that I felt these tears streaming down my face. It was a moment of, like, ‘I feel so alive right now.” That moment helped lead to the powerful lyrics of track ten, “Dance No More.” The beginning of the song frames the deep feeling of not having a connection with the surrounding environment, once again highlighting the new, settled-down life that Styles’ friends are living while he is out partying. Repetition within the first verse reflects a frustration towards that sort of party life, sick of conversations going nowhere. The chorus is where things sort of change a bit. Styles uses his experience in Berlin and describes it in the song as “feeling like the music has been Heaven sent, And that there’s no difference in between the tears and the sweat,” giving his emotions complete front row and showing us how important music really can be. In the bridge, Styles uses the phrase “respect your mother” to pay tribute to 1960s and early 1970s Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ underground subcultures due to their immense impact and roots in disco, soul, funk, and R&B, and refers to other musicians and dance to respect the music and musicians.
Styles wrote and dedicated the last track of the album, “Carla’s Song,” to his friend, stating, “Carla kind of just became, in so many ways, the most important part of the record to me.” The song holds so much and answers the questions of “why and who do I want to be and what am I giving by doing this,” Styles said. It’s like a moment of remembrance for what you like and what makes someone them. Styles used the song in a way to touch and connect with music. He said, “She’d [Carla] kind of mentioned in the room that she’d just discovered Paul Simon. So she was kind of asking everyone like, ‘Oh, have you heard Paul Simon?’ I played her ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’ and watching her listen to it, having never heard that song, felt like I was just watching someone see or something or discover magic. There was something in that moment that reminded me of, like, by making music, what you’re investing in, and it’s songs that go so beyond our lifetime.”
The rhythms and lyrics of Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally show how Styles has grown to be more loose and free than in past years, but still cares deeply about what he is making for his fans. For this release, instead of a full-on outlandish tour, Styles plans on doing semi-long residences around the world, fitting into the idealistic family side of the album, calling it “Together, Together” in reference to the 2023 “Love On Tour” last performance in which Styles surprised fans with a new ballad titled “Forever, Forever.” While fans are excited for the new music and upcoming live performances, every hope of seeing the great Harry Styles live was quickly squandered when fans saw how pricey tickets were. One fan wrote about how the cost of two tickets totaled a little over $1,500 and that seeing Styles would have to wait. In late January, Styles announced a limited tour, stopping in Amsterdam, London, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, New York, Melbourne, and Sydney, adding additional stops and extensions to certain cities as a way to apologize and appeal better to his fans. Not only did he add to the ‘tour,’ but he teamed up with the streaming platform, Netflix, to release his first live concert, “One Night in Manchester,” for fans who can’t buy tickets. The concert debuted on March 8, two days after the album’s release.
