Harry Styles and the art of running

Sted Sarandos finished the Berlin Marathon under three hours. A remarkable time. Tattoos, total black clothing and bib number 31261: at the end of September 2025 everyone was talking about him, especially since Harry Styles was behind that attempt to go unnoticed. It hadn't gone any better four months earlier when, as white smoke rose from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, among the crowds flocking to Via della Conciliazione, the singer curiously made room behind a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap with the words 'Techno Is My Boyfriend'. For almost two years Styles had been touring Rome, but it was in the German capital that 'Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally', the fourth solo album by an artist who is thirty-two years old but has been playing the role of pop star since he was sixteen.

Harry Styles had stopped after the nearly two hundred concerts of a tour that began in 2021 and spanned both 'Fine Line' (2019) and 'Harry's House' (2022), ending in July 2023, the month in which he turned thirty. He had hardly done so with the One Direction machine, which had churned out five albums in forty-eight months. The last chance to catch up with his old bandmates, however, was anything but pleasant, it was 20 November 2024 for the funeral of Liam Payne, who fell from a Buenos Aires hotel balcony on 16 October 2024, a loss Styles described as 'really hard to process'. So came first Rome, where he learnt to sit down for a coffee without the anxiety of producing something at all costs, and, most importantly, Berlin, where a Radiohead concert in the middle of a crowd made him realise, in his own words, 'what it was like to be on a stage'.

Produced by Kid Harpoon and recorded at Berlin's Hansa and London's Rak studios, Harry Styles' new album is full of collaborations and opens with echoes of Lcd Soundystem in 'Aperture': long, bright and choral, as the recent Brit Award performance underlined. The opening track also immediately exposes the album's biggest flaw, the unimpressive lyrics. This is confirmed by "American Girls", with a deep bass struggling with a sequence of piano chords in the background, and "Ready, Steady, Go!", which brings back the indie dance of the early 2000s. In "Are You Listening Yet?" the absolute protagonist is percussionist Tom Skinner - Styles saw him in action with Smile in Rome in June 2024 - while the Eighties return overbearingly in the atmosphere of "Taste Back". Reminiscences of early Gorillaz filter through from 'The Waiting Game'; more interesting is the hypnotic 'Season 2 Weight Loss'. If "Pain by Numbers" resonates Beatlesque in its production and melody, "Dance No More" nods to Chic. 'Carla's Song' closes, born out of an evening when the singer played 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' to a friend who had never heard it before. "Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally" is not the album that some call a masterpiece, but Harry Styles puts himself out there by letting himself be seduced by the idea that he can tackle pop in a freer way. He doesn't turn it upside down like his peer Rosalía, who long ago sported the same 'Techno Is My Boyfriend' hat, but by dint of running Sted Sarandos might get a taste for it.