It’s no secret that the response to Harry Styles’s latest album, Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally, has been as muddled as the album’s title. Lead single "Aperture" brought a tentative, exploratory kind of excitement, but the album itself (released March 6) received mixed reviews, with star ratings hovering between three and four. The album’s chart performance was disappointing relative to other Harry Styles albums; its lead singles dropped out of the charts’ top spot within a week (As It Was, by comparison, stayed at No.1 for ten weeks). Tickets to his mammoth residencies – 12 nights at Wembley, 30 at New York’s Madison Square Garden – were snapped up and then resold, with some fans unconvinced by Styles’s new, more dance-focused sound.
But this album was a seed planted in live music spaces, fuelled by Styles’s recent Eurotrip adventures in Berlin and Rome, where he befriended countless dancefloors, aided by the anonymity and phone-free policies of techno clubs. So it’s only fitting that it would properly bloom when performed on stage. In the Standard’s original review of KATTDO (an annoying but necessary acronym), we pointed out how these songs were bound to come alive when played to a crowd, and Styles was clear that he had crafted this record with that in mind. (People have doubted Harry Styles before: lest we forget, this is a man who didn’t just survive the hazardous journey from boy band member to solo artist, but has become the blueprint for said path, far eclipsing the likes of Justin Timberlake and Robbie Williams.)
