The title is doing too much work. Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. reads like a joke Harry Styles hasn’t fully committed to, or a defence against being taken too seriously.
Either way, it’s the first time he’s sounded uncertain about what people expect from him. The full stop halfway through, the comma before the punchline: it’s grammar as deflection.
He’s announcing his fourth album the way someone orders a drink they’re not sure they’ll finish.
The artwork matches that energy. Styles stands beneath a disco ball suspended in an empty field at dusk, wearing swimming goggles and looking at nothing in particular.
It’s whimsical in the way things are when they’re trying very hard not to be earnest. The disco ball isn’t in a club. The goggles aren’t in water. The field stretches into darkness.
It’s an image built on displacement, like he’s turned up to the wrong genre entirely and decided to stay anyway.
This arrives 1,336 days after Harry’s House, the album that won him a Grammy for Album of the Year and turned “As It Was” into the kind of song that soundtracks everything from TikTok montages to supermarket aisles.
That record felt like vindication: proof that Styles could be both commercially colossal and critically respected without compromising either.
He played 179 dates across 22 months, sold out stadiums, and then vanished almost completely.
Since July 2023, he’s run a marathon in under three hours, appeared at the Vatican for a papal announcement, and said almost nothing about music.
The silence wasn’t mysterious. It felt like someone finally exhaling.
The comeback campaign was characteristically cryptic. Billboards appeared in New York, Manchester, and São Paulo with the phrase “we belong together” and little else. Fans gathered to photograph them.
A website launched. WhatsApp messages went out (just Styles’ voice, a cappella, singing those same words).
It was the kind of rollout designed to make people feel like they’re in on something, even if there’s not much to be in on yet.
The song itself hasn’t been released. The tracklist remains hidden. Pre-orders are live for vinyl, CDs, and box sets that include an analogue camera and a bum bag, because why not make consumption feel like curation.
Kid Harpoon returns as executive producer, the same role he held across Styles’ previous three albums. That continuity suggests comfort rather than reinvention.
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There’s no indication this will sound radically different from Harry’s House or Fine Line: the same soft-rock shimmer, the same 1970s pastiche filtered through expensive production.
The title hints at disco, but Styles has always borrowed genres more than inhabited them. He wears influences the way he wears Gucci: beautifully, but never quite lived-in.
What’s interesting is how little urgency there is around any of this. The announcement doesn’t feel like a return so much as a reappearance.
Styles isn’t making a case for why this album matters now. He’s simply saying it exists and will be available in March.
That’s a kind of power, but also a retreat. He’s spent years building an image of someone universally adored, unthreatening, and endlessly likeable.
This title, with its awkward punctuation and throwaway tone, is the first crack in that facade. It sounds like he’s bored of being the guy everyone thinks they know.
Rumours suggest residencies at Madison Square Garden and Manchester’s Co-op Live, a venue Styles has invested in.
Glastonbury 2027 is also being whispered about, though the festival takes a fallow year this summer.
If those happen, they’ll be about spectacle. Styles has always understood that his greatest asset isn’t his voice or his songs, but his ability to make people feel like they’re part of something just by showing up.
The disco ball in the field is the same logic. It doesn’t belong there, but it looks good in a photo.
Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. lands 6th March 2026, executive produced by Kid Harpoon and spanning 12 tracks.
No singles have been released yet. The album is available to pre-order now across limited vinyl editions, CDs, and exclusive merchandise bundles.
Whether it sounds like a retreat or a reinvention remains to be seen. But the title alone suggests Styles has stopped trying to be everything to everyone. That might be the most honest thing he’s said in years.