Everything about the launch of Harry Styles’s fourth solo album underlines that its author is a very big deal indeed. Record stores in the UK are opening at midnight or first thing in the morning on the day of release, the better for fans to avail themselves of a copy at once. Styles has been announced as curator of this year’s Meltdown festival at London’s Southbank Centre, an honour previously bestowed on Scott Walker, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Ornette Coleman and David Bowie. Last week’s Brit awards featured not merely a beautifully choreographed performance of the album’s lead single, Aperture, but a comedy skit that was, essentially, a two-and-a-half-minute-long advert for Styles’s new album: there was no doubt who the organisers thought the star of the show was. Most striking of all, the accompanying tour largely eschews actual touring in favour of lengthy residencies in one venue per country, or even continent: North America is covered by a staggering 30 dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The expectation seemed to be that Styles’s fans are so devoted, they’ll cross the country to see him, rather than vice versa.
This sense, that people will travel wherever Harry Styles wants them to, attends the album itself. It is devoid of unequivocal pop bangers along the lines of As It Was or Watermelon Sugar. Aperture’s hazy, post-club mood wasn’t a soft launch. Whether it’s dealing in mid-tempo house beats topped with plangent piano chords, as on American Girls, or the acoustic singer-songwriter-isms of Paint By Numbers, a lot of what’s here feels like music made in the small hours, with the curtains drawn against the dawn. It somehow manages to sound understated even on Are You Listening Yet? – which variously features a clattering dance rhythm, a bassline not unlike that of Reel 2 Real’s I Like to Move It and a spoken word vocal that inexorably recalls Robbie Williams’s Rock DJ – perhaps because it doesn’t really have a chorus, or rather, the part you assume is going to lead into the chorus turns out to be the chorus itself.
Painting everything in muted shades is a risk that intermittently pays off. On the plus side, it gives what’s here a unified atmosphere – it feels like an album, rather than a collection of tracks – and there are moments when the songs lure the listener in with their finely crafted subtleties: Season 2 Weight Loss’s echoing breakbeat, ghostly backing vocals and splashes of analogue synth; the closing Carla’s Song, on which Styles’s voice and gauzy electronics float over a techno-paced four-four pulse; the pizzicato strings and intimate vocals of Coming Up Roses. But there are points where it feels like it’s all mood and no material, where subtly lit songs pass by pleasantly enough, but don’t really linger in your memory afterwards: The Waiting Game, Taste Back, Pop.
A sense of musical vagueness is compounded by what Harry Styles is singing. As suggested by Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally’s title – which sounds like something you would see on a poster in a certain type of person’s kitchen, next to a sign informing you that it’s prosecco o’clock – the album has a problem with words. He has described the lyrics as “a long diary entry” about his life between this album and his last, much of it apparently spent in Italy. But if so, it appears to be a diary kept in code, lest anyone work out what he’s actually on about. “But you call Leon / You call it only in my head / Cause you’ve got enough / While we do too much / But you call Leon / You did call it only in my head,” he sings on Ready, Steady, Go!. Chiedo scusa? as they say in Rome.
Occasionally you find yourself grasping for meaning, as on Pop – are the lines about being a “squeaky clean fantasy” about the strictures of his time in One Direction? – and then giving up, baffled, in the face of the next verse: “Katie’s waiting to be your game-day saviour / First time tasting it / It’s nice to mix two flavours together / Mmmm.” Indeed, you begin to wonder if Styles is writing in full awareness of the wearying current obsession with unpicking songs for gossipy details about pop artists’ private lives: don’t bother trying that.
And in an era when some pop stars seem desperate to cling on to their place at the top by any means necessary – from doing down rivals in song to boosting their chart placings by drip-feeding diehard fans with umpteen limited editions – there’s something oddly laudable about an album that doesn’t seem desperate to be loved, even if the results are occasionally a little too opaque for their own good. And, of course, its flaws are besides the point, at least commercially. The expectation that Styles’s fans would travel to see him turned out to be entirely correct: 11.5 million people applied for tickets to his 30 New York shows. If you know whatever you do next is almost guaranteed to be huge – if you are, unequivocally, a very big deal indeed – why not please yourself?