When you hear the word disco, what comes to mind? I think of Donna Summers' rapturous, futuristic pleasures and Chic's utopian club music. Disco balls and illuminated dance floors. At its best, the sound of '70s sexual liberation. At its worst, silly, hedonistic corniness.
For Harry Styles, to disco is to move to the sound of something far more subtle. "Aperture," the first single from Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, the confusingly titled fourth solo album the artist announced last month, makes it clear that Styles isn't reaching for disco to try on like a costume. This isn't prepackaged by your local Barnes and Noble-turned-Spirit Halloween, or even the funky, '70s pastiche of his last album's songs like "Late Night Talking" or "Cinema." The song is slow-burning, minimalist electronica, as suited for the sunny, pothos-filled interiors of some cool urban coffee shop where people are trying to get work done as it is for an actual discotheque.
"Aperture" isn't a disco song, yet it still sounds retro, harkening back to a period of soft, electro-pop music made in the mid-2000s by bands like early Hot Chip or The xx (whose member Jamie xx is a special guest at Styles' New York residency for the album). In a recent interview, Styles said a major inspiration for his new sound was LCD Soundsystem, who he saw perform for the first time recently, longing to mime the feeling of the band's music when he was on stage. And honestly, while it doesn't possess nearly the same swaggering confidence and specificity of LCD Soundsystem's best songs, I do hear it, in Styles' tinny vocal production and the track's skittering, escalating drum machines. It's not hard for me to imagine Styles, whose on-stage persona has been joyous and glam-rock-lite for the last few albums, dressed in jeans and a disheveled suit jacket rousing a Madison Square Garden audience to sing its "we belong together!" chorus together under some enormous, glimmering disco ball.
Whether or not that's cool or insanely corny to you, there's been a real, building nostalgia right now for music that borrows from mid-2000s music trends, particularly pop music, among a generation of listeners Styles' age and younger. (The ex-boybander is 31, and would have been a 5th grader in American terms around the time of LCD Soundsystem's heyday.) PinkPantheress' mixtape, Fancy That, was a testament to her love of British dance music and electro-pop of that era, featuring interpolations and references to mid-2000s hits from groups like Basement Jaxx and the girl group Sugababes. The year before, Charli XCX similarly played with electroclash and 2000s UK rave culture on her trashy, party girl epic brat. Last year, Lady Gaga sounded as if she had turned back the clock on her own music, releasing songs on MAYHEM that sounded so similar to what she had done at her peak that it bordered on self-plagiarism.
To pivot to that era of electronica makes sense when artists like Dua Lipa and Beyoncé have already made glossy '70s disco and '80s house music Top 40 genres — been there, done that, basically. But I also see this nostalgia happening not just in the style of so much music, but the current fetishization of fairly recent analog music technology, from wired headphones to MP3 players. That sound Styles and so many recent artists take inspiration from was one before an avalanche of truly industry corrupting phenomena: streaming services, TikTok, a global pandemic and a dismal touring landscape. This is perhaps why LCD Soundsystem can continue to play a residency a year (though it feels like more, I swear) in Brooklyn to both old and new audiences: artists, and surely fans, wish they were making and partying to and even just listening to music in that simpler time. For pop artists, the 2000s is increasingly becoming a vintage music era as codifiable and impersonated as the 1970s. Spirit Halloween costume to come.
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