We don’t know much about Harry Styles’s first album in four years beyond its title – and it’s already causing some grammatical consternation.
The follow-up to 2022’s Grammy-winning Harry’s House is a bit more esoterically named: Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. In an era when fans clinically investigate every aspect of pop stars’ lives, it was perhaps inevitable that Styles’s choice of punctuation would draw scrutiny.
The key dilemma: is the comma in the right place? “We’re going through a really experimental period with comma usage,” wrote @poeticdweller in an X post with nearly 1m views. One concern appeared to be that the two sentences don’t follow the same rules: “The comma turns the second sentence from a parallel imperative sentence to a fragment that vaguely gestures toward the occasional presence of disco,” noted another post, in a sentiment echoed elsewhere.
It all raises two questions: one, did Styles get it wrong? And two, does it matter? (Question three is, of course: who cares? But it’s nice to have a distraction from the daily horrors.)
As for the first question, it’s true that the lines are not parallel. If Harry is speaking in the imperative, telling us to kiss constantly and also to sometimes go to the disco – using “disco” as a verb – then it would be consistent to leave out the comma. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Styles is doing anything wrong.
“It’s not a perfect construction by our grammatical standards and that’s fun,” says Britt Edelen, AKA @poeticdweller, who wrote the viral post and is a PhD candidate in English at Duke. The result, intentional or not, is that “it adds some kineticism to what would otherwise be boring” and “fits into a larger scheme of people trying to articulate things via commas that aren’t actually how we use them”. He cites Virginia Woolf – known for long, heavily punctuated sentences – as one example; more recently, the movie Die My Love leaves out a comma where we might expect one.
Also, disco is not usually a verb. “When I see ‘disco, comma’, it’s giving me a little bit of a mental break,” says Ellen Jovin, author of several books on grammar and star of the road-trip docu-comedy Rebel With a Clause, in which she traveled the country forging connections through conversations about sentence structure and punctuation. Edelen agrees: the comma, he says, was probably added to “render the time of speech graphically, as in: disco [pause] occasionally”.
In the second sentence, Styles has “changed parts of speech. I’m now working with a noun, and then it’s kind of playful”, he says. The comma leads to “a different adverbial idea: not all the time, just occasionally”. And Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. is surreal language to begin with – it’s unlikely you’d see the phrase come up in a research paper or international treaty. “People are trying to impose some sort of standard sentence punctuation on something that’s not that at all,” Jovin says.
On top of that, the context matters: this is an album title, not high school English. Even if it were English class, you would see this sort of thing in a novel – “commas that you would say the same kind of thing about: ‘Wait, that’s not right. That doesn’t belong there,’” Jovin says. “This is just creativity, and I think it’s perfect.’”
The visuals matter here too; maybe Styles just likes the way the comma looks, especially in a world where we see song and album titles more and more. Unlike physical media – or early MP3s, which gave users some control over metadata like song names – music-streaming apps proudly display the title of each song on our phones with the artist’s preferred styling and punctuation. Artists have played with this ability in recent years: on Billie Eilish’s 2017 EP dont smile at me, for instance, most of the song titles were lowercase, while they were in all caps on 2024’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. Dijon’s album Baby, from last year, includes tracks titled HIGHER! and (Freak It). In the last week of 2018, according to a Quartz analysis, eight of Spotify’s Top 200 songs were styled in all caps or all lowercase; the next year, “more than 30 songs in a typical week” contained “non-standard capitalization”. (Quartz theorizes that the trend is related to the informality of texting.)
It’s worth remembering that grammar rules are fluid and change from stylebook to stylebook, which is why, for instance, the album and film titles in this article are not italicized or put in quotes (see “titles”). Unlike the perception we might develop in school, there is no Official Global Consortium of Correct English whose henchmen will break your knees over a comma splice. “I think Americans are overly punctilious punctuators. They tend to pay attention to rules and prohibitions a lot,” Jovin says.
That’s not to say that grammar never matters, of course. There are plenty of rules that stylebooks and experts do agree on, and what counts is clarity. Take the example from the Guardian style guide about the importance of a well-placed comma: there’s a difference between dedicating a book “to my parents, Martin Amis and JK Rowling” and “to my parents, Martin Amis, and JK Rowling”.
When it comes to an album title, on the other hand, ambiguity may be exactly the goal.
In a possible case of nominative determinism, Styles clearly demonstrated his penchant for grammar at a 2015 show, adding an apostrophe and an E to a Philadelphia fan’s sign so it said “You’re so nice” rather than “your so nice” (he then wrote “thank you – love, Harry” and gave it back, in case there was any doubt about the sign’s message). If Styles is a grammar nerd, the controversial comma was probably meant to be.
