Harry Styles let the light in with his new album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, but to do that, he first had to undo his impulse to close himself off, which he explained in a new interview came from his early days in One Direction.
While speaking with Tom Power in an interview posted Monday (March 9), the British pop star shared that much of his new LP was inspired by his recent experiences of saying “yes” to more public outings, which he’d previously avoided due to his celebrity status. “My experience of being in the public domain is something that, obviously you learn a lot about what you’re comfortable with and what you’re not comfortable with,” he began.
“When I started in the band, we were encouraged to give a lot of ourselves away, let people get to know you,” he continued, referencing his time with 1D from 2010 to 2016. “Finishing that, and then when I started working on my own stuff, there were parts of that where I was learning what I was comfortable with and trying to have parts of my personal life be more private and juggling a little bit with that.”
After moving to Italy for a period of time, however, Styles says he realized, “If I keep saying no to everything, I’m just going to shut myself off to the world.”
The Grammy winner has been open about how Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally — which dropped March 6 — was born from a need to open himself up to new people and experiences, but the new interview shines a light on how the pressure to be overly accessible to fans during his boy band days previously affected his mindset on the matter. On a similar note, he recently spoke to Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1 about how, even now, he feels the weight of people’s expectations to discuss his personal life, especially following the death of ex-bandmate Liam Payne in 2024.
“I think there was a period when he passed away where I really struggled with acknowledging how strange it is to have people kind of like own part of your grief in a way,” he told Lowe. “I have such strong feelings around my friend passing away. And then suddenly being aware of there’s maybe a desire from other people of you to convey that in some way, or it means you’re not feeling what you’re feeling or something, you know?”
But while it can still be complicated, Styles has been open about how he learned to let go of his fears and step out into the world more while living in both Rome and Berlin, inspiring songs such as Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Aperture.” During his time in Italy, one of those momentous outings was joining the hordes of people in Vatican City who gathered to celebrate the naming of Pope Leo XIV, which he shared more about in his talk with Power.
“It’s something about people gathering on behalf of something that is so much greater than what we can understand,” Styles mused. “There is this inherent vulnerability in people where we are all coming together, and there’s this admittance of, like, we’re gathering to something we can’t see and we can’t feel all the time and isn’t necessarily as tangible as the things that are always around us. There is vulnerability in admitting that we all believe in something, whether that is music, whether that is religion, whatever that is.”
Watch Styles’ full interview on Q With Tom Power above.
