Last May, pop fans and pope fans united in the shared thrill of playing Where’s Waldo: Harry Styles Edition when fans spotted the singer outside of Saint Peter’s Basilica to welcome the papacy of Leo XIV. Now, with a new album to promote, the singer is finally explaining why he was there.
It turns out, Styles was just getting his hair styled in Italy that day, according to a new interview he gave BBC Radio 1 on Friday. “It happened [when] I was getting a haircut in Rome, and then I just heard all these people start shouting: ‘Habemus papam, habemus papam’ [‘We have a pope’], and people just running down the street.
“So the guy cutting my hair, stopped cutting my hair, and he was like: ‘Habemus papam. There’s a new pope. There’s a new pope.’ So then we finished up, and then I was like: ‘Oh, I’m like, five minutes’ walk [from there]’, so I walked over there.” Stating the obvious, he added, “It was wild.” He didn’t mention the “Techno is my boyfriend” hat he was wearing or why he was wearing a hat after a haircut, but hey, there was a new pope, so who cares.
In the same interview, Styles discussed the title of his upcoming fourth studio album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, according to The Independent, joking that he’d almost titled it, Drink Water All the Time, but You Have to Pee Occasionally. In another Friday interview, this time with John Mayer, he stood pedantically by the real title’s proper punctuation. “It’s a very important comma,” he said. He even voiced out the words “disco” and “occasionally” with a pregnant pause between them. “I think it’s like… the comma is correct,” he reinforced.
Styles also told Mayer that he solicited more feedback than usual from “a lot of people” for the LP, which will come out March 6. “I think every other record that I’ve made, I’ve always felt really guarded about who’s hearing it, and it’s always felt, you know, no one hears it until it’s finished and stuff like that,” he said. “And I think realizing that that made the music feel like a product, is something that I wanted to reverse.”
To change things up, he played demos for friends and asked opinions. He found that he liked hearing the songs both loud and on headphones. “I hope that people will kind of road test it in a couple different ways and see how their album experience kind of shifts,” he said.
One thing became obvious from the process: “Aperture,” released Thursday night, was the perfect lead single for him. The song is the first track on the album, but the last he recorded when he finalized the album last summer. “It was kind of when we were at our most free… and was just like, this is the first song that I play to people when I’ve showed them what the new music sounds like,” he said. That feeling made the song “obvious” as the first one he’d share with the whole world.
Speaking of the whole world, Styles will be setting up shop all over throughout the year, playing concert residencies in cities from São Paulo to Sydney. He’ll spend the most time in New York City, where he’s playing 30 shows in a span of 66 days at Madison Square Garden. That gives him enough time to get at least a couple of haircuts.
