Harry Styles to Release ‘Aperture,’ Lead Single From Disco-Tinted Album Due March 6

Harry Styles is opening his next musical chapter with “Aperture,” a new single that will usher in a disco-tinted fourth studio album and mark his first major release in four years.

Single release details

Styles announced this week that “Aperture,” described as the lead single from his forthcoming album, will arrive Thursday at 7 p.m. Eastern (4 p.m. Pacific)—timed to a midnight Friday release in the United Kingdom. The song will be issued through his Erskine imprint and Columbia Records.

It is the first preview of “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.,” a 12-track album due March 6. The project is billed as Styles’ fourth solo studio release and his first full-length since 2022’s “Harry’s House,” the Grammy-winning record that cemented his status as one of pop’s dominant figures.

People magazine, which first detailed the single’s timing, reported that Styles is “ready to let the light in with his new single ‘Aperture,’” framing the song as the opening salvo in a new era.

Styles confirmed the single on Jan. 20 with an Instagram post showing him in a recording studio, arms spread wide in celebration. The caption named the track and listed its release time. The announcement followed a week of escalating hints that had already sent fans hunting for clues online and in city streets.

Album rollout and collaborators

The album itself was formally unveiled Jan. 15. In coordinated social posts and label materials, Styles revealed the title, release date and cover art for “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.,” along with the return of longtime collaborator Kid Harpoon (Thomas Hull) as executive producer.

Associated Press write-ups of the announcement noted the album will contain 12 songs and be “executive produced by Kid Harpoon… a close collaborator since [Styles’] 2017 self-titled debut.” The record will be released by Erskine and Columbia on vinyl, CD, cassette and box-set editions, with related merchandise already on sale through Styles’ official store.

The cover image—shot by photographer Johnny Dufort and distributed by multiple outlets—shows Styles outdoors at night, wearing jeans and a T-shirt beneath a disco ball suspended among trees. The scene, more backyard gathering than nightclub, underlines the playful juxtaposition in the album’s title: constant affection, disco only “occasionally.”

Why “Aperture” matters to the campaign

“Aperture,” the song that will introduce that sound, takes its name from the adjustable opening inside a camera lens that determines how much light reaches the film or sensor and how sharply a scene is focused. The term links directly to language that has threaded through Styles’ recent promotional campaign, including the phrase “let the light in” printed on teaser posters.

In the weeks leading up to the announcement, Styles and his team rolled out a tightly controlled series of clues.

The hints: video, posters, and a WhatsApp channel

On Dec. 27, he posted an eight-minute video titled “Forever, Forever” on YouTube, featuring footage from the final night of his Love On Tour run in Reggio Emilia, Italy, in July 2023. The film, which showed Styles performing an original piano piece, ended with the words “WE BELONG TOGETHER” filling the screen—a phrase that quickly migrated into fan theories about a fourth album.

Around Jan. 12, posters and digital billboards with that same slogan began appearing in cities including New York, London, Berlin, São Paulo and Manchester. Some read simply “WE BELONG TOGETHER” in block letters; others carried additional lines such as “see you very soon,” “here we go again,” “it’s all waiting there” and “let the light in.”

At the same time, a website, WeBelongTogether.co, went live. Visitors saw crowd imagery and were directed to sign up for “HSHQ,” or Harry Styles Headquarters, which funneled them into a WhatsApp channel. Fans who opted in reported receiving automated texts and at least one brief voice note of Styles murmuring, “we belong together.” Several said that sending the phrase “let the light in” to the channel returned a camera emoji, further tying the campaign to the photography theme now embodied in “Aperture.”

By Jan. 15, the suspense gave way to confirmation when Styles named the album and locked in the March 6 release date. The single announcement five days later completed the initial rollout, giving fans a concrete timeline: “Aperture” first, full album to follow six weeks later.

The stakes after ‘Harry’s House’

The new project arrives on the heels of a run that has reshaped Styles’ place in pop music.

“Harry’s House” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and on the UK’s Official Albums Chart in 2022. It went on to win album of the year, best pop vocal album and best engineered album (non-classical) at the 2023 Grammy Awards, and took album honors at the BRIT Awards. Its lead single, “As It Was,” spent 15 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was later named Billboard’s top global song of 2022.

The album fueled Love On Tour, a 169-date trek across five continents that ran from 2021 to 2023. The tour grossed about $617.3 million and sold roughly 5 million tickets worldwide, according to industry tallies, placing it among the five highest-grossing concert tours in history and the year’s top tour by a male artist. A 15-night run at Madison Square Garden in New York culminated in the arena raising a permanent banner in Styles’ honor, a distinction shared with only a small group of performers.

Those figures have led industry analysts to view “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” as a high-stakes follow-up. Promoters and commentators expect Styles to return to the road in some form in 2026, though no tour or residencies have been officially announced. Reports in entertainment and tabloid outlets have speculated about possible repeat engagements at Madison Square Garden and at Manchester’s Co-op Live arena, as well as potential festival appearances, but those remain unconfirmed.

Context for longtime fans

The new album also arrives in a different emotional landscape for many of Styles’ earliest fans. News accounts have noted that it is his first major project since the death of former One Direction bandmate Liam Payne in 2024, after a fall from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Styles has not publicly linked his upcoming music to that loss, and there is no indication in official materials that the album explicitly addresses it. Even so, the timing and the campaign’s “we belong together” messaging have shaped how some longtime fans talk about the release online.

A disco moment in pop

Musically, the title “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” positions Styles within a broader wave of mainstream artists returning to 1970s and 1980s dance and disco textures. Recent successes by Dua Lipa and Beyoncé have shown the commercial pull of those sounds. In Styles’ case, critics and fashion publications have read the album’s imagery and branding as a signal of a romantic, disco-influenced palette that still leaves room for the soft rock and synth-pop heard on his previous records.

Kid Harpoon’s prominent credit points to continuity. The British songwriter and producer has worked with Styles since his self-titled 2017 solo debut and helped craft the sound of “Fine Line” and “Harry’s House.” His return suggests the new album will extend, rather than abandon, the melodic and production choices that carried Styles from arena headliner to stadium draw.

What comes next

For now, key details remain under wraps. Styles has not released a tracklist, and no additional singles have been named. There is no word on a music video for “Aperture” or on television performances tied to the single.

What is clear is that Styles is once again calibrating how much of his world to bring into focus. From a surprise concert film to coded posters, from a niche URL to a global WhatsApp channel, the rollout for “Aperture” has narrowed fans’ attention to a single point of light: a three-minute song arriving simultaneously on phones and speakers around the world.

At the moment the track goes live—Thursday evening in the United States, just past midnight in London—listeners will get their first chance to hear how one of pop’s biggest stars plans to follow a career-defining album and a record-setting tour. The aperture will open, at least a little, on what Harry Styles sounds like in 2026.