After four years of running marathons, fumbling beautiful biracial women and trying to follow up 2022’s successful “Harry’s House,” former One Direction star and Grammy-winner Harry Styles is back for his fourth solo album, “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.” 

Styles’ progression as a solo artist represents a steady deviation from his acoustically grounded roots — for better or for worse — with his latest album being his most produced yet. “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.” is an inoffensive album and represents Styles’ most ambitious stab at a distinct pop sound so far. 

At its best, it’s confused. At its worst? A mismatched semi-sweet slog through attempted Talking Heads tributes.

It’s got some great individual building blocks: a funky bass line here, some zesty synths there and a few standout vocal performances. But altogether, it often feels like Styles is mixing and matching melodies, tracks and lyrics at random, without much apparent relation between any of the songs’ elements. 

In “Ready, Steady, Go!,” a track that reflects several of the album’s systemic issues, Styles chooses to pair filtered vocals with a semi-raunchy instrumental rock track for the chorus. But, he also implements sentimental, chamber music-adjacent acoustic guitar interludes between the verses and the chorus while singing vaguely erotic lyrics. Where these components intersect feels dissonant, like someone smashing keys on a piano and calling it a waltz. 

The experimentation at play throughout a majority of the album feels unrooted in analog instruments, as if the songwriting process — arguably Styles’ greatest strength as an individual artist — wasn’t grounded with a guitar or piano to give melodies a clear shape.  

Instead, the end results read more like Styles and Kid Harpoon, the executive producer of the album, twiddled with tracks for as long as possible until they became nonsense, and in the meantime, Styles assigned glimmers of lyrical concepts to tracks at random when it came time to lock in the direction of each song.

This theory sounds most likely across “Taste Back,” “The Waiting Game” and “Season 2 Weight Loss,” which remain largely untextured and unintuitive to the ear thanks to uneven mixing, forgettable lyrics and disjointed elements butting heads. Out of the three, the latter offers the most thematic and sonic intrigue, though the title felt randomly assigned and underexplored. 

Even the experimental moments that worked, with clunky yet still compelling production, still had out-of-place compositional characteristics; some of the wider swings, like the almost-strong finale “Carla’s Song” or the eclectic “Dance No More,” feel self-conscious or overly self-aware. It’s as if Styles is looking at listeners for approval before he fully takes off in a new direction.

One of the best departures from his tamer, more straightforward pop sound of “Harry’s House,” “Pop” has a killer backing track that loses steam from the get-go, thanks to a weird vocal approach in the prechorus. If it wasn’t for the song’s sonically compelling and narratively clear chorus, complete with tension built and released à la dance- and gospel-esque breakdown, it would have been lost to the slog.

There are moments throughout the album where Styles’ attempted foray into the David Byrne wonderland of semi-electro pop finds its footing, although they feel a little underdeveloped or vaguely disingenuous to Styles’ skills as a musician. Nevertheless, those instances feel like where Styles wants to be, infectious in their earnestness and effective in their effort.

Styles almost finds his footing in the lead single and opening track, “Aperture,” a moody, bombastic tune that escapes the slippery, intangible melody and rhythm of its verses once its lyrically rooted and introspective chorus kicks in. 

With an intro and backing track suited for an Olivia Dean song, “American Girls,” an arguably more straightforward choice for a single, would be better off vocally as a One Direction track with more vocal support to allow the lyrical cliché of “all over the world” in the chorus. But it’s fun and accessible as a peek into what Styles was going for in the rest of the album.

“Are You Listening Yet?” is a highlight of the album and a track for fans of Wolf Alice and endearingly awkward lyricism. Though the vocals would have benefitted from being whispered as opposed to sung in staccato, nearing rap, the chorus is engaging, and the tension the song builds yet refuses to release is compelling, albeit a little cheeky considering the album’s consistent adherence to a more dance-centric dogma. 

In a wild and welcome swing to the left, “Coming Up Roses” and “Paint By Numbers” let dancing dogs lie, taking a more acoustic and rooted approach that reflects more of “Fine Line” than “Harry’s House” for the better. Both songs could have been longer, and the fact that they feel slightly out of place on this album is the rest of the album’s fault. 

Despite the long wait for “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.,” Styles would have benefited from even more time spent honing his electronic compositional skills and developing his spirited approach to a refreshed artistic identity. 

An artist knowing exactly what they want from a track or album isn’t always necessary, but it gets exhausting after wondering what it is he’s trying to say with this album for the fourth straight song. Evolution is always welcome, but not when it’s successful occasionally.