Celebrating a new number one album with Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, flamboyant singer songwriter Harry Styles says his new work is all about “life.”
Rather than planning an album, his latest offering – with tracks including, Aperture, Dance No More, Ready, Steady Go! Coming Up Roses and Paint By Numbers – was a series of songs written around what was happening in his life, which he eventually pieced together to form his fourth studio album.
Explaining his relationship with pop music, Harry, 32, says: “I think it can feel like, ‘Oh, I make pop music and, therefore, I have to make this. I think a lot of this album was exploring what I could make playing with that.
“It’s a very playful thing, pop music, so I think being able to, like, move within it was something that I wanted to explore. “
Dating Big Little Lies and Mad Max:Fury Road Star Zoe Kravitz, 37, it is Harry’s first new music in four years and follows the 2022 Grammy-winning album, Harry’s House.
Released on March 6, his new album – which comes after a hiatus, following his Love On Tour, which involved 169 shows – debuted at number one in more than 20 countries, including the US and the UK.
Harry, who has properties in New York and Italy, still keeps his main base – a £15 million ‘compound,’ consisting of several adjacent homes forming one ‘estate’ – in north London’s wealthy Hampstead, says: “This one [album] felt like I was just writing a lot of songs, just as life was happening.”
With an estimated net worth of £225 million, Harry has come a long way since his early life.
Born in Worcestershire and raised in Cheshire by his mum, Anne, after she and his dad, Des, divorced when he was seven, he attended comprehensive school – singing covers on a karaoke machine bought by his granddad and winning a Battle of the Bands competition with his band White Eskimo.
Now the former One Direction star boasts more than 36.9 million album sales and more than 20 million streams with his four consecutive number one solo albums.
Despite the success of Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, some critics have called the songwriting shallow and the sound repetitive.
But the star clearly loved producing it. Asked if there’s a profound meaning to the words “no difference in between the tears and the sweat” on the track, Dance No More, he says it simply reflects the feeling he gets when dancing.
He says: “I think anyone who’s been in the middle of a dance floor like that and felt that release that you get from having experiences with music, I think knows that feeling of like, ‘I’m just covered in tears and sweat and it’s all the same.’”
Rather than reflecting any meaningful experience, he says it’s “more about life.”
Harry admits his decision to produce a different kind of album, without any rigid plan, had its tricky moments. He says: “I think to make something meaningful requires a lot of patience, waiting for the special things to come. I think sometimes what can be difficult is feeling like nothing is happening. It’s not working, I’m not doing something right.”
Holding his nerve and letting his creative juices flow was worth it, he says, when he saw it all come together.
Harry adds: “I think just giving myself some space to let a lot of these songs happen was what led to this album being made in the most different way from things I’ve made before, when maybe I’ve booked a studio and was in and I was planning to make an album.
“It was really late in the process that I felt ‘Oh I’m working on an album now.’ I think that’s what’s exciting to me, is that I’m kinda open to whatever happens.”
Harry Styles was interviewed on The Arts Hour on the BBC World Service, which is available on BBC Sounds
