Adrian Thrills: Styles Transitions to Serious Solo Artist

: Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally (Erskine/Columbia)

Verdict: Harry hits the dancefloor

Rating:

Four stars. 

He completed last September’s  marathon in an impressive two hours and 59 minutes – and Harry Styles is also showing remarkable stamina in a pop career that began when he was a callow teenage hopeful on The back in 2010.

His last album, Harry’s House, helped him to sweep the board at the BRITS in 2023, where he picked up all four awards he was nominated for. 

Harry’s House also won album of the year at the , confirming Styles’s status as one of the few British singers who is a global superstar.

It’s a position the 32-year-old from Holmes Chapel in Cheshire will be hoping to consolidate when his fourth solo album – Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally – comes out on Friday.

Like George Michael and Robbie Williams before him, the former One Direction singer has made the difficult transition from boy-band pin-up to serious solo artist.

On Harry’s House, he did it with an agile blend of R&B and soft-rock. This time, he’s putting his own slant on dance music – hence the ‘disco, occasionally’ bit of the title.

Those expecting rowdy rave anthems should be wary, though. There are indeed several dance numbers, including recent single Aperture and the funky Dance No More. 

But on the whole, the mood on the 12 new songs that cocoon the listener in a wall of silky sound and supple vocals is subtle and restrained.

Styles made Kiss All The Time... with regular collaborators Kid Harpoon, once a solo artist on the London indie scene, and American multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Tyler Johnson.

There’s one big orchestral ballad arranged by conductor Jules Buckley, and three tracks that feature backing vocals by Ellie Rowsell, of Wolf Alice.

Aperture, the song sung by a pinstripe-trousered Styles at the BRITs, opens the record with a pulsating electronic hum that sets a subdued, but danceable, tone. 

‘We belong together,’ he sings, in a celebration of dancing the night away, and it’s a theme he returns to on Are You Listening Yet?: ‘If you must join a movement, make sure there’s dancing,’ he advises.

So much for the disco. What about the kissing?

Harry is a romantic at heart, and his amorous instincts are to the fore on atmospheric ballad American Girls (‘cause time will show that you should try it, those American girls you spend your life with’) and the orchestral Coming Up Roses, a loved-up ballad that could have come from the One Direction songbook.