Harry Styles Came Back With a Five-Minute Electronic Track and Still Debuted at Number One
Harry Styles could have played it safe. After nearly four years away from music, a Grammy win for album of the year, and "As It Was" spending 15 weeks at the top of the Hot 100, the obvious move was another breezy pop single. Something instantly hummable. Something radio could slot in without thinking.
Instead, he released "Aperture" — a five-minute, slow-building electronic track with no chorus until well past the two-minute mark. It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 anyway.
That disconnect between the song's unconventional structure and its commercial dominance is the most interesting thing happening in pop right now. And it says more about where the genre is heading than any year-end trend piece could.
The Berlin detour that changed everything
Styles spent much of 2024 and 2025 out of public view. He ran the Berlin Marathon. He accidentally showed up at the announcement of Pope Leo XIV. He was spotted visiting RAK Studios in London. Rumors circulated about a synthesizer-heavy album inspired by his time living in Berlin, which naturally drew comparisons to David Bowie's own Berlin period in the late 1970s.
The Bowie parallel isn't just lazy music journalism, though. Bowie moved to Berlin at the peak of his fame and made his most experimental records there. Styles did something similar: he stepped away from a massive arena tour, relocated to a city known for its club culture, and came back with music that sounds nothing like "Watermelon Sugar." GQ noted that Styles was "reaching for his David Bowie moment," and the comparison has more substance than most celebrity parallels.
In an interview with John Mayer on SiriusXM, Styles explained the shift simply. He'd been going to LCD Soundsystem shows during his time off. "This feeling of being in the audience is so magical," he said. "That's the music I wanted to make. I wanted it to feel like it was made from the dance floor."
What "Aperture" actually sounds like
The track opens with layered, pulsing synths that build slowly. There's no immediate hook, no verse-chorus-verse structure pulling you along. Styles' vocals sit low in the mix, reverbed and almost fragile against the electronic production. When the "we belong together" refrain finally arrives, it lands because the song has earned it through patience rather than formula.
Critics have lined up with comparisons. NME called it "one of the boldest and least familiar sounds in Styles' catalogue," noting its euphoric house piano elements and drawing parallels to LCD Soundsystem. The Independent praised the delayed-gratification structure. Consequence described it as "a throbbing piece of dance music with Styles' signature romantic overtones."
Not everyone was convinced. Fan reaction was split — some praised the new direction, others found it repetitive and underwhelming. A Michigan Daily review put it honestly: "I'm not convinced Styles is the next LCD Soundsystem" but acknowledged the potential for the full album to expand his range.
The production details reveal how committed he is to this sound. Kid Harpoon produced the entire album at RAK Studios in London. Ellie Rowsell from Wolf Alice sings background vocals. The House Gospel Choir appears on the track. This isn't a pop star dabbling in electronic music for a single — it's a full ensemble production built around a specific sonic vision.
The chart math doesn't add up (and that's the point)
Here's what's genuinely surprising: "Aperture" debuted at number one despite being, by conventional standards, a terrible lead single. It's over five minutes long. The hook is buried. The production owes more to 2000s trance and house than anything currently dominating Top 40 radio. For context, One Direction never had a Hot 100 number one. Only two former members have: Zayn with "Pillowtalk" in 2016 and Styles with "As It Was" in 2022.
The fact that Styles got a third number one with his least accessible single suggests something Billboard's analysts identified: people were hungry for a major pop release. "Four of the top 10 songs have been charting for over 30 weeks," wrote Meghan Mahar. "I think people have been waiting for a major pop star to break through again."
This echoes what happened with Charli XCX's Brat era — audiences gravitating toward artists who take genuine creative risks rather than optimizing for algorithmic performance. Billboard's Hannah Dailey made the connection directly, noting that "Harry's Brat era" is loading and that his fanbase "is willing to embrace Harry no matter what type of music he releases."
Whether "Aperture" holds the top spot like "As It Was" did for 15 weeks is another question. Billboard's consensus leans toward a shorter run, closer to "Watermelon Sugar"'s single week at number one. The extended intro and weaker hook work against long-term chart dominance. But that might not matter to Styles, who seems more interested in artistic credibility than chart longevity this time around.
The album title is doing a lot of work
Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. is set for March 6, with 12 tracks and a 43-minute runtime. The title itself has generated plenty of discussion. In his John Mayer interview, Styles said "the comma is a very important one" — suggesting the album might be more sonically diverse than "Aperture" implies. Rebecca Milzoff at Billboard speculated that the disco elements might be "more sporadic than an overall flower child-ish romanticism."
The tracklist supports that reading. Titles like "Are You Listening Yet?", "The Waiting Game", and "Paint by Numbers" suggest self-awareness about public perception and artistic expectation. "Season 2 Weight Loss" and "Pop" hint at commentary about fame and the music industry itself. "Carla's Song," the closing track at 4:14, could be the intimate ballad that balances out the electronic experimentation.
Styles also announced Together, Together, a series of concert residencies across seven cities, plus a one-night-only show at Manchester's Co-op Live on the album's release date. The residency model — which he established with his 15-night Madison Square Garden run in 2022 — suggests he's building this era around the live experience, which aligns with his LCD Soundsystem inspiration.
Why this matters beyond Harry Styles
The bigger story here isn't really about one pop star's sonic evolution. It's about what succeeds in pop music in 2026. The current chart landscape is stagnant — songs lingering for months, streaming algorithms favoring consistency over surprise. When an artist breaks through that static by doing something genuinely unexpected, the response is disproportionately enthusiastic.
Styles is betting that audiences want to be challenged, not comforted. That a five-minute electronic track with a delayed hook can compete with whatever's been sitting in the top 10 for half a year. Based on the first three weeks of data, he's right.
The album drops March 6. If the rest of the tracklist matches "Aperture"'s ambition, Styles will have made the most interesting major-label pop record since Charli XCX's Brat. If it retreats to safer ground, "Aperture" becomes the one great risk in an otherwise conventional album cycle. Either way, he just proved something useful: four years of silence followed by a genuine left turn still beats the content treadmill every time.
Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. is available for pre-order now.