LAD LIFE MUSIC

On the morning of March 6, 2026, I made my way over to an Athens staple; Jittery Joes. I connected my air pods to my phone and sat on a high-rise table with my laptop open to do schoolwork. While choosing something from Spotify to listen to I decided to listen to Harry Styles’ brand new album Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally. I played the first track “Aperture,” which I had already listened to as it was previously released as a single. However, within the first minute of the first new track “American Girls,” I knew something was going to shift in my life. Not specifically because of the music, but because of an external influence transitioning me into a new era from the release of a new Harry Styles album. 

Styles has now released four studio albums since the end of One Direction, a band I grew up listening to. Sitting in Jittery Joe’s that morning, I began to reflect on the specific attachments I have to each Harry Styles album. Whenever I listen to Fine Line, I am immediately transported to my freshman year of high school—before we ever knew what COVID-19 was—when I sat on the school bus in the early morning cold, the sun still rising, and listened to “Cherry” on repeat until I exhausted the song. This album was a staple in my music listening all throughout that specific moment in time early in the pandemic where everyone on the internet including me was making whipped coffee, doing YouTube workouts, and learning TikTok dances. Listening to “Canyon Moon” now gives me that naive hopeful feeling I felt in March 2020. 

Flash forward to May 20, 2022, on my last day of Junior year of high school, Harry Styles released his third studio album Harry’s House. Out of all the Harry Styles albums, this one has the most significant meaning to me. Listening to “Matilda” for the first time, I resonated with the lyrics so much that it almost felt like divine timing in a way. It felt like a letter Harry was writing straight to me. This song deals with themes of growing up and as someone who has dealt with guilt about leaving home to go to college far away, I was eating up this song. Whenever I listen to this song now however, I see that 17-year-old girl about to enter her final year of high school trying to figure out her life, and I just want to tell her that everything will work out the way it is supposed to. Harry’s House accompanied me throughout that summer during my multiple trips, morning runs, and days by the pool. As senior year rolled around, my favorite song from this album was and still is “Satellite,” and I replayed this song so much when I was applying for colleges and doing all the senior things that whenever I listen to it the same gut feeling of this era comes back to me. 

In reflecting on all this, I realize that Harry Styles’ album run so far is a perfect example of how the music I listen to defines my life. It is not just the actual music that can give me reminders of times in my life, but also something like seasons changing. Every single year, when the weather shifts from the crisp air of autumn to the harsh winter, I get a sensation where I physically crave listening to Evermore by Taylor Swift. And the other way around whenever I listen to this album at any other time of year, I immediately get the feeling I have when I drive around my hometown during winter break. When I listen to any song by The Sundays, I instantly feel a bittersweet happiness from my memories of walking around Oxford, United Kingdom during my study abroad last summer. I repeated their whole discography over and over again those six weeks when I walked in the park and studied in the beautiful libraries. 

I imagine everyone who loves listening to music as much as me has certain albums or songs that define certain moments or aspects of their life. Especially with an artist like Harry Styles who only releases albums every few years, his music coincides with different stages of my life that I can retrospectively look back on. Music has so much nostalgia attached to it that so many other forms of art do not carry. Sometimes there are songs that I listened to repeatedly during a bad time in my life that I can’t even listen to anymore because the feeling I get from listening to now is so overwhelming that I must turn it off. I believe that there is beauty about how much music accompanies my life and intertwines with who I am deep in my soul. 

So, what is Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally defining right now? To be honest, I am not sure yet. It’s still difficult to assign a particular aspect of my life to this record since I am currently living through this era of my life. I have a few thoughts though, such as my most recent spring break trip where we played the new album on a loop in the car on the way to Orlando. And now since getting back from spring break, the weather in Athens, Georgia has been magnificent and I am getting excited for what the summer has in store for me. I truly believe and hope that when I revisit this album in the future after not listening to it for a long time that I will be reminded of happy memories and joyful moments. And when the next Harry Styles album comes out, who knows where I will be in my life? All I know is that whatever the music sounds like, it will coincide with living.