Harry Styles’s Lyrical Vagueposting Doesn’t Make Sense

In his song “Paint by Numbers,” one of the least disco songs on his new album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., Harry Styles croons about “holding the weight of the American children whose hearts you break.” On first listen, I thought he was talking about me — or rather, not me, personally, but the greater hoards of One Direction fans who have continued to follow his career and who express their disappointment at one thing or another he decides to do. There’s a more obvious read of the lyric, however, and it’s that Styles is referencing his relationship with his Don’t Worry Darling director, Olivia Wilde, and whatever association he had with her children she shares with ex Jason Sudeikis.

It’s a jarringly specific line in the grand scheme of Styles’s music, which errs on the side of vagueposting. He gestures and he nods, sure, but he avoids giving too much away. Privacy and authenticity are valuable assets for any artist to maintain, but Styles has never been a master of crafting a specific image, let alone a lyric that possesses a kind of crystal-clear metaphor or emotion. Part of the appeal of a song like “Watermelon Sugar” was that it could … kind of just be whatever you wanted it to be. Same goes for equally aloof titles like “As It Was” and “Sign of the Times.” The most clear-cut his lyrics have ever been are in “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” in part because he’s naming literal foods. His ballads, on the other hand, tend to just circle the drain, as if he was posting on an Instagram Story a caption like “Depressed, don’t text,” leading everyone else to text each other about what’s wrong with him. 

None of this would necessarily be a problem — we don’t need Styles namedropping John Lautner like Dua Lipa or making an an Easter egg seeker’s dream hunt like The Tortured Poets Department — if Styles was content to be more of a showman than a poet, but it’s his ongoing insistence that these songs do mean something and are actually giving a lot away where things start to get fuzzy. In his conversation with Zane Lowe, he discussed how he wanted Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. to have a kind of openness that his past work didn’t have. “I look at the past albums now where I was kind of like, Oh, this line is super vulnerable, and I’m like … is it?” Styles goes on to say that it’s why he felt “Aperture” was a perfect start to his album.

“‘Aperture’ is so about the moment of realizing, No, I was in the wrong for something, and you can move forward when you acknowledge the things you don’t know and therefore give yourself the space to let light come in,” he says. It’s a song born out of how “in my feelings” the singer felt. Those feelings, however, never really make it out of the speakers. It’s a song dense with phrases like “It’s complicated” and “We belong together,” with nods towards “Tokyo scenes” and sports metaphors. “It kind of ended up being the freest song on the record,” he says to Lowe. When he finished working on the track, Styles explained that it felt like the last thing he “hadn’t quite said yet.”

Even if Styles feels like “Aperture” is his most free song, there are other tracks on the new record that do sprinkle in some specifics, suggesting that if Styles is moving toward a more vulnerable place, he’s just doing it in a way he can’t seem to grasp or describe himself. Songs like the undeniable banger “Ready, Steady, Go!” make mention of “Leon,” which would mean something if that name had any weight in the song, but the lyric “and you call Leon” just says … that someone calls Leon. Styles told Lowe about playing his friend Carla “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and then his album closes with “Carla’s Song.” The song descends into Styles repeating that he knows what the listener will like — “It’s all there waiting for you.” If this song lets you in on anything, it’s that Styles can give a good music recommendation. Those Easter eggs are fun, if not completely indecipherable, but they at least give the music a kind of thrill. The most intimate song — the one where it feels like Styles is letting us in on something — is “Are You Listening Yet?,” which reads like he’s berating himself, riffing on his therapist being “well-fed” and having “un-intimate sex.” That he would see “Aperture” or “Paint by Numbers” as more vulnerable reveals he has little sense of what he’s giving away and why.

After explaining the origins of “Aperture” to Lowe, Styles admits that “Paint by Numbers” — the is-it-or-isn’t-it-about-Wilde song — was almost the first song on the album, to which Lowe scoffs, in a rare moment of earnest surprise. Styles’s instinct to bury that song deep into the record is probably a more emotionally coherent choice, but it’s also one that reflects his tendency to bury his secrets throughout his songs. Even if he thinks foregrounding “Aperture” is an act of vulnerability, he winds up doing what he always does on his records: sending everyone on a wild-goose chase to find out what exactly he’s saying about what or who or why. Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. does start to feel a bit more intimate and grounded — less platitudinal or annoyingly vague — but only once the party comes to a close and all the light’s been let in.