Harry Styles has topped the UK album charts for a third time with his latest album, Kiss All The Time. Disco Occasionally.
According to the Official Charts Company, the record sold more than 183,000 copies after its release last Friday, eclipsing the first week numbers of his previous album, Harry’s House, which shifted 113,000 copies in 2022.
Some 66,000 of those albums were sold on vinyl - making it the biggest-selling physical release of the year.
The achievements come despite lukewarm reviews for the record, with The Telegraph saying it had “all the emotional heft of a perfume advert”.
The Guardian also gave it three stars, describing the listening experience as “nice all the time, good, occasionally”.
“The music on Styles’ new album is muted, subtle and pleasant – but from the title downwards, he has a real problem with words,” said the paper’s chief music critic, Alexis Petridis.
NME was more positive, saying Styles sounded “liberated and full of light, even in [his] more melancholy moments”; while Clash magazine said the album was “a successful embrace of personal, and above all sensual, evolution”.
The BBC’s own review noted that there was a disconnect between the “muscular” songs and the “existential crisis” of Styles’ lyrics, concluding: “As a portrait of an artist at a crossroads, it’s compellingly knotty.”
In interviews, the musician has said the album was inspired by his attempt to re-enter the real world after his 22-month Love On Tour tour.
He described those attempts as “saying yes to everything”, spending time as an audience member and remembering what it felt like to get lost in a crowd, dancing and singing with strangers.
“When you close certain doors off to protect yourself, you also shut out a lot of positive things,” he told BBC Radio 1’s Jack Saunders.
“So, I think, for me, it was about being more open, trusting [and] leaning into meeting new people and making new friends and going with the momentum of what it meant to say yes to things for a while.
“And it just really defined the record that I made. It was about me experiencing the world in a way that was different from how I’d experienced it for a long time.
“I think it’s encouraging the audience to have their own experiences and and be open to the world.”
Styles launched the album with a special concert in Manchester, which was filmed and released as a Netflix special on Sunday.
It helped Kiss All The Time... achieve the biggest opening week of the year, said the Official Charts Company.
It’s also the biggest opening week for a male solo artist in nine years, since Ed Sheeran’s ÷ (Divide) in 2017.
Styles also topped this week’s singles chart with American Girls, with two further songs in the top five - Aperture at number four and Ready, Steady, Go! at five.
His success means that British artists have occupied the number one position on the album charts for each of the first 11 weeks of 2026 - the first time this has happened in a decade.
Styles joins Olivia Dean, Robbie Williams, Louis Tomlinson, Charli XCX, Mumford & Sons and Gorillaz as a recent chart-topper - but the run could be broken by the long-awaited return of K-Pop idols BTS next week.
“This phenomenal 11-week run is just the latest evidence of what an incredibly exciting time it is for British music right now,” said Dr Jo Twist, head of music industry body the BPI.
With new releases on the horizon by Raye, Arlo Parks and Jessie Ware, “we can look ahead with a genuine sense of optimism,” she added.
The news came in the same week that the BPI announced that the UK’s music industry had generated a record £1.57 billion in 2025.
Source: BBC
--Agencies
