Most of the heavy hitters in the club of artists with over 100 million Spotify followers — names like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Ed Sheeran, Drake, and the Weeknd — seem allergic to the concept of substantial time off. Their albums tend to roll out every year or two, punctuated by long stretches of live gigs and other exploits beyond music. The underlying notion that you can easily get lost in the shuffle if your devotees aren’t consistently seeing and hearing from you animates a modern pop landscape that’s overflowing with appeals for sustained attention. So it’s fascinating how little we’ve heard from singer-songwriter, actor, and occasional late-night-TV fixture Harry Styles over the past three years, a span during which his peers dropped two or even three albums.
After a deluge of stadium concerts and films, Styles’s capable if drippy 2022 adult-contemporary opus Harry’s House managed to upset Beyoncé’s Renaissance for Album of the Year at the Grammys. The 31-year-old then grew about as scarce as he had previously seemed ever-present. He guest hosted The Late Show With James Corden in 2023, memorialized late One Direction cohort Liam Payne and Fleetwood Mac icon Christine McVie in 2024, and ran a three-hour Berlin Marathon last fall but avoided any official business entirely. Now Styles returns with “Aperture,” the lead single from his upcoming fourth album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. It carries the weight of succeeding “As It Was,” his last album’s lead single — which broke chart records in the U.S. and U.K. via New Wave revivalism à la the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” The new song moves away from the Reagan-era-pop fixation of Harry’s House, an insular work also shaped by domestic seclusion in 2020. Styles is catching up to the back-outside boisterousness of his contemporaries, shifting his focus to euphoric turn-of-the-millennium dance sounds he gleaned from clubbing in Europe. Creating distance from the last campaign, he carefully recalibrates, juggling indie signifiers and mainstream trends to adapt the music of his evening excursions for his day job.
Harry is finally leaving the house, both in the sense that we haven’t heard much from him and that he is sidelining his last album’s themes and interests: being inside, being obsessed with synth-drenched late-20th-century easy-listening music, being in love with (his now ex) actor-director Olivia Wilde. The Grammy shine for Harry’s House overshadowed the reality that the music was growing cozy and reserved. His work is a winding argument about whether or not he wants to be a pop star. He made ferocious strides early on as a solo artist to wedge into the conversation about successors to classic-rock giants like Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks but later cashed out on the more buttoned-up pop plays of what would come to rank among his biggest hits: “As It Was,” the pivotal sophomore album Fine Line’s “Watermelon Sugar” and “Adore You.” “Aperture” is the groggy trip back out into the streets following the cloistered wee-hours lust of 2022’s “Daylight.” His new song keeps it simple: Styles is letting the light in and the beat breathe. This electronic music begs to be embraced by the masses not by rushing to a hook but by building a jittery groove that can get tens of thousands to dance. (Ecstatic reviews from big-tent EDM bros like the Chainsmokers and John Summit suggest Styles will get his wish.) You could get to the tail end of “As It Was” in the time it takes “Aperture” to approach its second verse.
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The latest single’s biting percussion and synth clatter are owed in part to Styles’s longtime producer Kid Harpoon’s growing taste for the bespoke sounds of modular gear. Styles told BBC Radio 1 it was also inspired by a memorable LCD Soundsystem concert held in a parking lot in Madrid: “You’re kind of watching them be so, like, immersed in it … Like, Oh, that’s how I want to feel when I’m onstage.” Like an LCD song — revisit the Talking Heads–style riff that emerges from the kitchen-sink percussion of “Dance Yrself Clean — “Aperture” wants you along on the journey of piecing the big riff together. Paradoxically, this amounts to taking chances on aesthetics that surged in the wake of Renaissance, which had even Drake flowing over house drums. Styles’s prior penchant for concise, jingly retro pop is being usurped by the same raver tendencies that have been fueling other writers in his field: FKA twigs and Dua Lipa each landed on trippy ’90s alt dance and Eurodance as their antidotes to modern ills; JADE and PinkPantheress’s work reflects the dance charts further along the Tony Blair era.
There’s room for a career time traveler like Styles to loosen up both structurally and lyrically. “Aperture” goes for broke on the former front, making all of its five minutes feel breezy, bouncy, and worthwhile. But lyrics riddled with absurdist one-liners signifying a life out of order — “Game called review the player” — feel fully in service of setting up shout-alongs to the cathartic “We belong together!” chorus for 30 nights at Madison Square Garden. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what he’s been saying when the refrain lands. The soaring, patient — if, as ever, on-trend — single, which Styles claims is a “mission statement” for the rest of the album, nets him his longest, strangest, most exhilarating single since his debut’s “Sign of the Times.”
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