Music reviews: Harry Styles, Johnny Blue Skies & the Dark Clouds, and Waterbaby

‘Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally’ by Harry Styles

★★★

From the start, Harry Styles’ first album in nearly four years establishes “an almost psychedelic sense of adventure,” said Joe Levy in Rolling
Stone. Subverting the expectations sown by Harry’s House, his 2022 Grammy winner, the 32-year-old pop idol has turned down his star power to create a more sensory musical experience. His voice is often submerged in the mix, “and though there are hooks—plenty of them—they too sometimes take a back seat to low-frequency thumps and grooves.” Strings and acoustic guitar pop up amid the beats and synth washes, resulting in an album that’s “delightfully strange, often lovely, and consistently fascinating.” You can often hear the influence of Radiohead and LCD Soundsystem on Styles’ new sound, said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times. It’s there in the “nervy electro-pop” of “Are You Listening Yet?” and the “glitchy pulse” of “Aperture,” the lead single. If you’re seeking depth, don’t bother. Often, the lyrics “resemble the seemingly life-altering epiphanies one has during a psychedelic trip.” Most don’t hold up to sober scrutiny. But when “Aperture” praises love, “who can argue with that?

‘Mutiny After Midnight’ by Johnny Blue Skies & the Dark Clouds

★★★★

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Though you won’t find it on streaming services, the new Johnny Blue
Skies LP is “an instant contender for Album of the Year as well as Greasiest Album of the Year,” said Alex Pappademas in GQ. Johnny is the alter ego alt-country great Sturgill Simpson adopted in 2024, and this time he takes listeners on a seriously wild ride, mixing “fevered curly-guitar-cord boogie” with “life-in-the-fast-lane disco” plus “true-testimonial soul” and “possible-final-season-of-American-democracy anxiety.” Currently, the record, an Atlantic release, is available for sale only in physical copies, and when some country fans hear it, said Matt Mitchell in Paste, they’re “going to call Simpson a commie or a libtard more than they already do.” He rips into Trump 2.0’s cruel authoritarianism from Track 1 and, keeping a promise about the album’s theme, “argues that sex is an antidote to fascism.” But he also pours his heart into “Don’t Let Go,” a tribute to his wife, and makes most of the rest grease-fry hot. Mutiny finds the 47-year-old Kentucky native and his band “on a country-funk tear, letting muscular guitar riffs defrost into mirror-ball rhythms.”

‘Memory Be a Blade’ by Waterbaby

★★★

“It all felt so important, till it all went away,” sings Waterbaby on her debut
album. Such is the mood of the brief eight-song record, which finds the
28-year-old Stockholm-based songwriter “half-fraught and half-free” as she looks back on a breakup, said Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian. Some lyrics are improvised, which may explain why the opening track feels vague. After that, though, Waterbaby “locks into a run of superb material,” her pretty voice sailing atop music featuring piano, guitar, strings, and brass, with occasional flute and dulcimer. Compared with the down-tempo bedroom pop she originally shared online, the record reveals “a surprising evolution in sound,” said Marcy Donelson in AllMusic. The music still has hints of jazz, but it leans more on acoustic instrumentation, and “the result is something physically closer, more delicate, and more diaristic.” Over the “bright and staccato” piano groove of “Beck n Call,” she and her singer-rapper brother, Ttoh, sketch a happy alternative reality in which the expired relationship worked out. The spell
can’t last. “By its final ‘mmm,’ Memory Be a Blade’s title has come into sharp focus.”