Harry Styles spends most of his delightful new album on the dance floor. Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. is the first new music in four years, since he conquered the pop game with Harry’s House and then left it behind. But the most powerful moment is the quietest. “Coming Up Roses” is the emotional centerpiece of the album, one of the only ballads, the only tune he wrote totally solo. It’s the closest he comes to a straightforward pop love song. But it’s the kind of romantic invitation that begins with “Tell me your fears.” It’s really about doubt and vulnerability, which is why it really sums up where Harry’s at right now.
The new album is basically a twin to his solo debut, from 2017 — both “starting over” albums, both avoiding any obvious hits or grandstand moves. He sings bluntly about escaping the trap of celebrity in songs like “Paint by Numbers.” The whole Kissco album feels emotionally naked, even in the electro-sleaze bangers — as he chides himself in another highlight, “The Waiting Game,” “You’ve been a little over-honest lately.” But “Coming Up Roses” is the mission statement — it’s the “Matilda” or “Cherry” of this album, the one that raises the stakes for all of the other songs.
He sings an extravagantly intimate ballad in the mode of Fine Line, just piano and an orchestra, with acclaimed conductor Jules Buckley. It’s two scared people finding a moment together, admitting their insecurities. “Just for tonight, let’s go hangover chasing,” he sings over the yearning pizzicato strings. “And I’ll talk your ear off about why it’s safe/As I fumble my words and fall flat on my face through the truth.”
These lovers don’t find any answers here — just a moment where they feel slightly less alone. “We’ll see out the night with your head on my chest, me and you,” he sings. But they worry about whether they’re telling each other too much, or not enough, or the wrong thing. “Does all of this seem to be bringing us closer?” he asks. “Or am I back-seating your life? Judging while you drive?” Two hearts let their guards down, fighting the urge to direct the scene like it’s a film, struggling to communicate, even if that just means resting in silence together.
The song ends with the album’s most painfully poignant moment — after the orchestral interlude, Harry comes back and sighs, “There’s only me and you,” then sings wordlessly along with the strings. Even though he’s not singing any lyrics at all, it somehow feels like his deepest confession.
In his recent Runners World interview with the legendary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Harry describes his fascination with the novelist’s characters. “When you write about sex and masculinity, your characters aren’t all experts at sex — there are a lot of scenes of them fumbling around. There’s an innocence to them, as well as vulnerability, and shame. That has definitely changed the way I view being masculine and being vulnerable.” That’s where he is in “Coming Up Roses.” The power is all in that awkward shiver in his voice.
Since his blockbuster Harry’s House, four years ago, he’s been spotted in a few unexpected places — but as far as he can get from the celebrity hamster wheel. Where you find him isn’t a red-carpet premiere or a fashion gala, but showing up in Rome at St. Peter’s Square, just in time for the announcement of the new pope. Or surprising everyone by running the Tokyo Marathon — on Oscar night, no less. What a flex, especially since Harry ran the marathon in less time than the Oscars took. He ran the Berlin Marathon a few months later, in 2:59:13 — setting a new personal record. As he once told Rolling Stone, he spent his 25th birthday reading Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. “I had a very Murakami birthday because I ended up staying in Tokyo on my own,” he said in 2019. “I went to this cafe. I sat and drank tea and read for five hours.”
Harry opened up about the personal turbulence behind the new album, as he turned 30 and fled the spotlight. He took refuge in Berlin, dancing in the electro clubs as just another anonymous reveler. “Over the years, I had to say no to everything I was invited to,” he said, “whether it was a friend’s birthday, a trip somewhere amazing, an opening. I started to wonder if I was saying no because I really was so busy or because it was more comfortable than saying yes. When you close yourself off to protect yourself from people who might bring negativity into your life, you’re also missing out on positive experiences.”
Kissco is his saying-yes album, with a grown-up flair for mischief. In his notes, he dedicates it “for those who helped me know when to say NO, when to say YES. For all my friends to dance to.” But the disco in the album title is less a musical rule book than a spiritual quest, where the dance floor is where you go to escape yourself and dissolve into the communal pulse of the crowd.
Harry’s House is a concept album about home — finding and creating the place where you belong — but this one is about leaving home and moving on. Last time, he took his motto from the transcendentalist sage Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world.” But four years after building Harry’s House, Kissco is about getting out into the world, and getting lost in it.
“Running is a conversation with myself,” Harry said in his Murakami interview, and he’s having those conversations all over Kissco. It’s full of songs about letting go and breaking free, made with a trusted circle of longtime collaborators, Tyler Johnson and executive producer Kid Harpoon. There’s loads of Eighties electro-pop in the music — Depeche Mode, Prince, New Order, Talking Heads, and a synth-marimba solo to make Tears for Fears proud. Plus LCD Soundsystem, whose live shows were an inspiration for this album. The dance bangers are full of ecstatic release, like the single “Aperture,” “Ready Steady Go,” and “Season Two Weight Loss.” “Dance No More” explodes with filthy synth squiggles over the Chic-style bass line, with the chant “Get your feet wet! Respect your mother!”
As with all Harry Styles albums, it hits deeper as you live with the songs over time. “Are You Listening Yet” finds him deep in an “As It Was”-style existential crisis. He recites a bleak diagnosis, reciting “God knows your life is on the brink/And your therapist’s well fed,” before detailing the kind of breakdown where you ignore the therapist’s actual words, forget your mantra, and seek solace in “the fix of all fixes, unintimate sex.” “Pop” is the song of a guy who loves pop as music, as mass communication, as a reason to prance in feather boas and spangled pants, but remains allergic to the celebrity hustle he outgrew in his teens. Tellingly, in this song, “pop” is the sound of a bubble bursting.
“Coming Up Roses” ties in with “Paint by Numbers,” the album’s other ballad, where he sings more openly than ever about the wages of fame. “They put an image in your head and now you’re stuck with it,” he laments, reflecting his own boy-band experience. It’s powerful to hear him sing “You’re the luckiest, oh, the irony/Holding the weight of the American children whose hearts you break.” It’s the “Freedom ’90” of One Direction. (When he pleads, “I’m not even 33,” he inevitably reminds you of his late bandmate Liam Payne, only 31 when he died in 2024.) But Harry finds his escape in the finale, “Carla’s Song,” with its urgent synth-pop hook, realizing that everything he needs is inside him, raving, “It’s all waiting just for you.” It’s an inspirational note to finish the album.
There’s a long pop tradition where youthful songwriting prodigies take stock emotionally as they head into their thirties. So it’s tough to resist calling this album Harry’s Hejira — like his hero Joni Mitchell in 1976, he’s 32, escaping the starmaking machinery and turning up the bass on a journey to find his adult self. Instead of driving through the desert, he’s exploring Berlin nightlife, but either way, it’s the refuge of the road, even though it’s obviously the least Joni-like music he’s ever made. (No dulcimers on the dance floor.) And since David Bowie’s another Styles hero, the album might evoke another London boy who fled L.A. to go incognito in Berlin — some of the album was recorded at Hansa Studios, the same spot where Bowie made Heroes.
But you can hide on a dance floor, in ways that you can’t when it’s two people alone. That’s what makes “Coming Up Roses” so powerful, with his voice front and center. It’s the opposite of the “unintimate sex” he mourns earlier on the album; it’s two people who give up trying to solve the mystery of it all, and surrender to the moment. Kissco is a whole album about learning to say yes instead of no, but “Coming Up Roses” is the most complex yes on the album. It’s Harry Styles at his most soulful and unguarded —and it sums up everything he has to say on Kiss All the Time.
