Between Harry Styles’ recent interviews with Apple Music and Runner’s World, a quote from the latter stands out: “I don’t even think I’m a creator; I’m just a recipient. I love to listen to music, I love to read books, but I’m just a reader, just a listener.” No, wait. Harry Styles wasn’t the one who said that. Haruki Murakami, in conversation with the pop star, did. Still, Styles – obviously adept at a few different musical instruments and an occasionally inspired pop songwriter – has never felt more like a recipient of other people’s music than he does on Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., tastefully recycling the sensibilities of a Matty Healy or Thom Yorke (whose The Smile collaborator Tom Skinner is featured on the album) while sidestepping any sense of personality, borrowed or not. Inevitably, you will find yourself a listener of these songs, though I doubt any of them will become as pervasive as the biggest hits from Styles’ previous albums. The sad thing is that you might also catch yourself wondering who made them: by the sound of it, a celebrity swimming, much less than running or even dancing, through the haze of an existential crisis murky enough for only the most devoted fans to project.
1. Aperture
“I’ve no more tricks up my sleeve,” Styles sings on only the second verse of the album’s opening track, a damning indictment of a lead single that hardly lifts itself up when the garden-variety chorus comes around – you can practically hear the “I guess” muttered after each repetition of “We belong together.” Upon release, it could plausibly be seen as a muted way of launching an album with some actual club influences by first teasing the afterparty haze. But as Styles keeps trying on different outfits, discovering some new tricks but conveying no tangible magic, ‘Aperture’ quickly fades from memory. Despite having listened to it a decent amount of times, I’m always surprised there’s a bridge, that it throws in another chorus, hammering the point home by hollowing itself out.
2. American Girls
‘American Girls’ gets the vibe right: a mid-tempo song with shiny piano chords that evoke the loneliness of watching love radiate through other people’s lives while your own flashes by. But it’s a muddled song whose singalong chorus – actually the most memorable on the album – underlines not only how anonymous but unclear it is: Who are these friends, let alone their American girls, and to what extent is this a veiled criticism? Styles told Zane Lowe it’s “about watching them get married and there just is a magic when you find the right person that you want to be with but I think watching them do that and seeing that it doesn’t come without any risk.” Again, there’s certainly no magic on ‘American Girls’, but no suggestion of risk either.
3. Ready, Steady, Go!
This song refutes claims of anonymity by mentioning someone named Leon, which somehow only makes whatever the situation is here more confounding. For the one song about infatuation on Kiss All the Time, there isn’t even the suggestion of kissing, only someone butterflying (ew) your belly and touching (gasp!) you goodnight. The exclamation point is somewhat warranted as the bassline has more pep in its step, but any kind of sensual urgency’s missing.
4. Are You Listening Yet?
There’s a lot more of it on ‘Are You Listening Yet?’, the oldest song on the record and therefore energized rather than stifled by touring – or rather emerging the precise moment where weariness breeds sarcasm and arrogance; it’s almost distasteful, which is a compliment in the overwhelmingly respectable context of this album. Unlike a song like ‘Aperture’ that bores itself out, it pulls the rug out just when it knows you’re paying attention. You at least hope you get to listen to more music like it.
5. Taste Back
Maybe the saddest thing about ‘Take Back’ is that the voice of Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell is completely buried in the background. You can almost hear her belting in the final non-chorus, making Styles’ dry repetition of “Do you just need a little love?” all the more unpleasant. “Did you get your taste back?” he sings, as if ‘Are You Listening Yet?’ was too risque.
6. The Waiting Game
The emptiness makes itself known, if only at a point on the album where it can most easily be ignored. “You can romanticise your shortcomings, ignore your agency to stop/ Write a ballad with the details while skimming off the top,” he sings, the most emotionally intelligible he’s been so far. But the self-aware honesty is marred by an arrangement that’s split between acoustic instrumentation and an annoyingly squeaky synth. Styles may be talking about his life when he says that you can try “messing with your own design” and it still adds up to nothing, but he’s also betraying how vapid experimentation can yield him the same rewards. Why not actually change it up, then?
7. Season 2 Weight Loss
If the experimentation sounded more like this, the album might have had greater staying power; its sparkling synths and shapeshifting breakbeat at least faithful to their dance-punk influences rather than faintly echoing them. It’s almost the inverse of ‘The Waiting Game’; musically close to scintillating, lyrically way too abstract. “You want a piece or nothing at all,” he concludes; when it comes to the music industry, any piece is better than nothing, even if it approximates nothingness.
8. Coming Up Roses
If ‘Coming Up Roses’ ends up being the album’s sleeper hit, a very plausible scenario, I wouldn’t be too mad. It’s the only point where the album’s understated facade leaves space for romantic earnestness, even if there’s nothing special or specific about the doomed affair in question. The orchestral break drives the song home, as if Styles’ words can only get him so far. I do find it funny, though, that the orchestral engineer is named James “Jez” Murphy and there’s no actual sign of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, probably the album’s biggest inspiration, on any song.
9. Pop
I have no idea what the Crystal Castles is happening here beyond indulging in some kind of “squeaky clean fantasy,” but Styles himself did it better on ‘Cinema’.
10. Dance No More
I do understand what the Jessie Ware is happening on ‘Dance No More’, and while no Harry Styles song needs the words “Respect your mother,” it is the most respectably infectious track on the album. If ‘Coming Up Roses’ is the sentimental ballad I wouldn’t mind hearing at the grocery store, ‘Dance No More’ is the jam I wouldn’t knock any DJ for using to warm up a crowd.
11. Paint By Numbers
I just can’t find the words to describe this predictably penultimate, vaguely confessional acoustic tune. If only it was right there in the title.
12. Carla’s Song
Only the third person to be mentioned by name on the album (assuming Katie’s not a slang term for a certain drug), Carla gets her own song, one that was supposedly vital to the heart of the record. A reminder of the transcendental power of music that nods to Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Kathy’s Song’, the closer – like most of the album – is more caught up in the memory of musical magic, “melodies like the tide,” than creating something akin to it that’s capable of sweeping you away. Occasionally, perhaps.
