Just hours after dropping his eagerly anticipated fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, Harry Styles made a triumphant return to the stage on 6 March for a special one-off gig at Manchester’s Co-Op Live arena.
That performance was documented by Netflix for a new concert film – Harry Styles. One Night In Manchester. – that showcases the synth-heavy dance-pop sound of Styles’ latest project, a creative direction inspired by the high-voltage live shows of LCD Soundsystem and the propulsive electronica of artists like Jamie xx and Ben Klock.
Styles’ electronic influences are on full display in the Netflix special: within seconds of striding on stage, he’s twiddling away at the kind of rig you might expect to see at a Floating Points set, not a sold-out arena show from a chart-topping heartthrob.
Article continues belowIt’s a decent setup, comprised of a Roland SP-404 MKII sampler, Roland RE-201 Space Echo tape delay unit and a desktop edition of the Sequential Prophet-6 analogue synth, but the most surprising piece of kit in Styles’ personal rig is a modular synth – not something you expect to see in the hands of the UK’s biggest popstar, it’s fair to say.
While Styles is a talented instrumentalist who regularly plays both keys and guitar alongside his backing band, a cynical observer might suspect that Styles’ modular rig is little more than a prop – after all, it’s probably not easy to focus on tweaking filter cutoffs and ADSR envelopes while you’re fronting a five-piece band and commanding the attention of a 20,000-strong crowd of ecstatic fans.
As far as we can tell, though, Styles’ modular is no stage dressing. When the star arrives on stage to the driving synths of Aperture, the album’s minimal techno-inspired opening track, his first move is to grab the controls on the LYRA8-FX, a delay/distortion module from Soma Laboratory that’s giving a crunchy lo-fi edge to the sequence coming out of the Prophet-6 he’s tweaking with the other hand.
It’s clear that the popstar is dialling in the distortion we can hear himself, though the Prophet-6 is evidently receiving MIDI from offstage or another member of the band, considering that the synth line is already playing when Styles appears on stage. Though the majority of the set’s electronics are handled by Styles’ bandmates hereon, he intermittently returns to his modular, Prophet and SP-404 throughout the show, when he’s not busy keeping the rapturous crowd thoroughly entertained.
The modular synth played a decisive role in the direction of Styles’ new project, according to producer Tom Hull, better known as Kid Harpoon. Following the success of Styles’ previous album, Harry’s House, Hull dove headfirst down the modular rabbit hole: “You hit a point in your career where people are investing in stocks, but I don’t know anything about that. I decided to buy a whole modular synth rack instead,” he told the New York Times in a recent interview.
Though he admits he was hesitant to bring the modular rig to his sessions with Styles, Hull says the star showed an immediate interest, and it was this shared obsession that ultimately shaped the synth-centric sound of Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. Though Styles’ excursion into electronica isn’t quite what we had on our 2026 bingo card, we’re certainly here for it – how long until we can expect to see the former One Direction member behind the decks at Berghain?
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