Harry Styles has just shared his new single “Aperture,” with the world. But if you happen to be lucky enough to be in the singer’s inner circle, you’ve been blissing out to the LCD Soundsystem-inspired slow-burn banger for months.
In a sit-down with John Mayer on his SiriusXM channel Life with John Mayer on Friday morning (Jan. 23), Styles described the process of audience-testing his upcoming fourth solo album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, and why this time he wasn’t shy about soliciting opinions during the process.
“I had a lot of people over and have been playing it and we’ve had like people in the studio and playing it. I think every other record that I’ve made, I’ve always felt really guarded about who’s hearing it and it’s always felt, you know, no one hears it until it’s finished and stuff like that,” said Styles of the LP that is due out on March 6.
“And I think realizing that that made the music feel like a product, is something that I wanted to reverse,” he added. “So to me, this album was much more open in the process of like, I was playing demos to friends and I’d be with friends and put it on and be like, ‘What do you think of this?’ And it just became really obvious that it was music that was meant to be played loud. That is when it feels its best. And then, you know, in total contrast to that, I love like sitting with it in headphones and like having my own experience with it as well. So, I hope that people will kind of road test it in a couple different ways and see how their album experience kind of shifts.”
Styles also revealed that he finished the album at the end of last summer, with the five-minute “Aperture” coming in under the wire and serving as what he described in another interview as a “perfect little bow” on the project.
“There was a couple songs floating around that we thought about kind of going with first and I think ‘Aperture’… it’s track one on the album,” Styles said of his latest team-up with longtime co-producer Kid Harpoon. “It was the last song that was made for the record. It was kind of when we were at our most free… and was just like, this is the first song that I play to people when I’ve showed them what the new music sounds like.”
The singer said all that taste testing made him realize that it was the “obvious” choice to be the first single to represent where he is at this point in his life. “I think, a lot of the time you make a song and by the time it’s finished, and by the time you’re putting it out, you’ve kind of like moved on emotionally slightly from what you’re putting on,” said Styles, 31 of leading with the song that still matches where his head is at right now. “And that just makes some natural disconnection.”
But perhaps most crucially, when Mayer asked Styles if he would like to see the album title’s unusual punctuation used exactly as intended, or if he’d get miffed if people ignore his grammatical rule-bending, Harry said, well, yes. “It’s a very important comma,” Styles said of the pause after “Disco” and just before “Occasionally.”
“Very important comma. I think it’s like… the comma is correct.”
The full 16-minute interview will air on a number of SiriusXM channels today (Jan. 23), including Life with John Mayer (11 a.m. ET, 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.), SiriusXM Hits 1 (8 a.m. ET, 10 a.m. and 12 p.m.), The 10s Spot (3 p.m. ET, 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.) and The Pulse (1 p.m. ET, 5 p.m., 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.).
Styles has also announced the dates for his upcoming Together, Together 17-city residency tour, which will find him playing 50 shows in seven cities, kicking off on May 17 with the first of six shows at Amsterdam’s Johan Cruyff Arena, before heading to London’s Wembley Stadium for six nights. He’ll head into July with two stops in São Paulo, Brazil and Mexico City before launching a 30-night run at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The tour is currently slated to wrap up with two-night stops Melbourne and Sydney, Australia in late November and early December, respectively.
Watch Styles talk about his new album with Mayer below.
