Harry Styles: Kiss all the time. Disco, check back occasionally – nice all the time. Good, sometimes | Harry Styles

eEverything related to the release of Harry Styles’ fourth solo album confirms that its authorship is indeed very important. Record stores in the UK open at midnight or first thing in the morning on the day of release, and it is best for fans to cash in on a copy once. Styles has been announced as the curator of this year’s Meltdown Festival at London’s Southbank Centre, an honor previously given to Scott Walker, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Ornette Coleman and David Bowie. Last week’s Brit Awards included not just a beautifully choreographed performance of the album’s lead single, Aperture, but a comedic skit that was essentially a two-and-a-half-minute advertisement for Styles’ new album: there was no doubt who the organizers thought the star of the show was. What’s even more surprising is that the accompanying tour largely eschews actual tours in favor of longer stays in one location per country, or even continent: North America is covered with an astonishing 30 dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The expectation seems to be that Styles’ fans are so loyal, they’ll cross the country to see him, rather than the other way around.

This feeling that people will travel wherever Harry Styles wants them to go, is present in the album itself. It’s devoid of the unmistakable pop of “As It Was” or “Watermelon Sugar.” Aperture’s foggy post-club mood wasn’t an easy start. Whether it’s mid-tempo house beats topped with deep piano chords, as on American Girls, or the acoustic singer-songwriter beats on Paint By Numbers, much of what’s here sounds like music produced in the wee hours of the night, with the curtains drawn toward dawn. He somehow manages to sound understated even on Are You Listening Yet? — which variously features a raucous dance beat, a bassline not unlike the beat of Reel 2 Real’s “I Like to Move It,” and spoken word that relentlessly evokes Robbie Williams’ DJ rock — perhaps because it doesn’t really have a chorus, or rather, the part you assume would lead into the chorus turns out to be the chorus itself.

Painting everything in muted shades is a risk that pays off sporadically. On the plus side, it gives what’s here a unified atmosphere – it feels like an album, rather than a collection of tracks – and there are moments when the songs draw the listener in with their subtleties: Weight Loss Season 2 reverb, ghostly vocals and splashes of analogue synth; Carla’s closing song, in which Styles’ voice and gauzy electronics float over a four-beat pulse; The pizza strings and intimate vocals of Coming Up Roses. But there are points where it all feels moody rather than physical, where subtly lit songs pass by pleasantly enough, but don’t really stick in your memory afterwards: The Waiting Game, Taste Back, Pop.

The sense of musical mystery is heightened by what Harry Styles is singing. He also suggested kissing all the time. Disco-titled “Sometimes” – which sounds like something you might see on a poster in a certain person’s kitchen, next to a sign telling you it’s a prosecco hour – the album suffers from a problem with words. He has described the lyrics as a “long diary” of his life between this and his last album, much of which appears to have been spent in Italy. But if so, it appears to be a diary kept in code, lest anyone could find out what it was really about. “But you call Leon / You only call him in my head / Cause you’ve got enough / While we do too much / But you call Leon / I only call him in my head,” he sings on Ready, Set, Go!. Chido Scosa? As they say in Rome.

Sometimes you find yourself absorbing the meaning, as in Bob’s – are the lines about being a “squeaky clean fantasy” about the limitations of his time in One Direction? — and then gave up, bewildered, in the face of the next verse: “Katie waiting to be your savior on game day / First time you taste it / It’s good to mix two flavors together / Mmm.” In fact, you begin to wonder whether Styles is writing with any awareness of the current, exhausting obsession with deconstructing songs for gossipy details about pop artists’ private lives: Don’t bother trying. Which.

And in an age when some pop stars seem desperate to cling to their place at the top by any means necessary — from beating out rivals in song to bolstering their chart positions through die-hard fans who are drip-fed with countless limited releases — there’s something strangely commendable about an album that doesn’t seem desperate to be loved, even if the results are sometimes too ambiguous for their own good. Of course, its drawbacks are beside the point, at least from a commercial standpoint. The expectation that Styles’ fans would travel to see him turned out to be exactly right: 11.5 million people applied for tickets to his 30 shows in New York. If you know that whatever you do next is going to be an unequivocally huge deal — and if you are, unequivocally, a very big deal already — why not please yourself?