Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally

Intermittently delightful if sometimes obtuse fourth album.

The results are always interesting and fun, but often hard to get a hold of – a slippery confection of influences that never stay still for too long lest they reveal a lack of depth.

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.

There are enough nods on Kiss All the Time to Styles’ stated influences—-a sharp, craggy synth running through “Season 2 Weight Loss”; chattering drum machine on the bittersweet Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-ish highlight “Taste Back”—that you can at least identify his intention. (This isn’t Dua Lipa talking up a Britpop album before delivering nothing of the sort with Radical Optimism.) But Styles undermines himself every time with moves straight out of the stadium-pop playbook.

While his charisma and star power remain undimmed, too much of this record is – pun intended – style over substance.

The result is a collection of futile, brooding songs that tries to encapsulate bigger-than-life emotions but ends up being too afraid to truly delve into them. He could just need a little love from someone, anyone, to get that refined taste back.