It has all (re)started surprisingly gently, with a song that is more a whisper than a pop screamer. Released today, Aperture starts with a soft electronic throb, and a beat that criss-crosses itself, smoothly building from dreamy verses of drunken nights out to a pulsing chorus of community and unity. Co-written with and produced by regular collaborator Kid Harpoon (AKA English singer-songwriter Thomas Hull), Aperture is a very clever comeback single. It doesn’t sound like it is trying too hard, because it knows its chorus will do all the hard work for it. The mood of Aperture is akin to a door opening a crack, light spilling in, and there’s the most handsome man in modern pop culture whispering sweet nothings.

As a lyricist, Styles generally favours the kind of oblique collision of quasi poetic phrases that sound meaningful but on the cold print of a page could mean just about anything you want to hear. “Take no prisoners for me / I’m told your elevating / Drinks go straight to my knees / I’m sold, I’m going clean” sounds like someone attempting a Bowie cut-up pastiche on old issues of glossy lifestyle magazines.

Yet by the time he gets to the melodious chorus call of “We belong together” it is game over. The soft mood of electronic, atmospheric upbeat EDM is reminiscent of such modern dance superstars as Fred Again and Barry Can’t Swim with a message and hook that will be unstoppable when it has been picked up by tens of thousands of voices to echo around global stadiums. Instead of coming out all guns blazing with big beats and thrusting choruses, the impression is that Styles has just slipped quietly back in with the anthem of the summer.

Styles’s fourth album will be released on March 6, entitled Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. The cover depicts Styles outdoors beneath a glittering mirror ball. It is likely to showcase the star doubling down on the kind of sensuous, touchy-feely, lightly dance inflected pop songcraft of such global smashes as Watermelon Sugar (from 2019’s Fine Line) and As It Was (from 2022’s inescapable Harry’s House).'

His tour, Together, will visit seven cities around the world from May, playing multiple nights in prestigious venues, including an astonishing 30 shows at New York’s Madison Square Gardens from August. As we have seen from Taylor Swift and Coldplay, this seems to be a new style of touring, arguably better for the environment and certainly less stressful for artists: take up residence in a major city (Styles also plays Amsterdam, London, Sao Paulo, Melbourne and Sydney) and let the audience come to you.

There is something very effortless about Styles approach to fame. Perhaps because he has effectively been raised in the spotlight, he never seems to be trying too hard. At 31 he has already been famous for 15 years, since emerging as a cheeky teenage contestant on The X Factor. The boy-band bounce has given us some of the defining pop stars of our age, including George Michael from Wham!, Justin Timberlake from NSYNC and Robbie Williams from Take That (and, arguably, Michael Jackson from The Jacksons). Styles took everything he learnt from One Direction and has pushed it into a distinctive space without appearing to even break a sweat.

His persona as a solo artist is very easy going, with a fluid, gender-neutral fashion style (mixing and matching male and female clothing) helping make him the poster child of the woke generation (of course, it also helps that he is so handsome he looks good in anything). Perhaps, in these stressful times, “woke” has become a divisive adjective, but by embodying its core principles of loving acceptance, Styles has made himself a safe space for audiences of all ages and persuasions. He carries it off lightly, because he carries everything off lightly.

His musicality is organic and authentic enough for older music fans, his pop-craft is gently mischievous and peppered with hooks (mostly, I suspect, courtesy of Kid Harpoon), his voice is melodious and fluid with a nice tone and not exactly a surfeit of emotion. Styles is easy on the eye, and easy on the ear.

I am not sure what happened to his adventures in Hollywood, which seem to have come to a pause. His good looks saw him briefly cast in eye-catching roles in notable movies (Dunkirk in 2017, Don’t Worry Darling in 2022) but his performances didn’t convince. Terrible reviews for his starring role in gay romantic drama My Policeman seemed to bring an end to delusions that he might actually have thespian gifts. It represented a rare misstep but barely seemed to put Styles off his stride.

For a global pinup, Styles has succeeded in living a surprisingly quiet life for the past couple of years, telling Radio 2 DJ Scott Mills in an interview on Friday that he has done a lot of travelling, likes to walk around London and visit cafes and not “shut himself off from the world”.

Last September, photos emerged of Styles (under the pseudonym Sted Sarandos but wearing only the lightest of disguises) competing in the Berlin marathon with 55,000 other runners, and posting a very respectable time of 2 hours, 59 minutes and 13 seconds. “Most people you meet out are wonderful,” Styles told Mills. “It’s been so wonderful for me… to stay in the universe. I think if you’re trying to write and make music about ultimately the human experience it’s hard if you’re not living a very human experience.”

Britain has struggled to register very strongly in the global pop market in recent years, particularly since the retreat of Ed Sheeran and Adele. For such an unassuming presence, though, Harry Styles carries a lot of weight. If his album delivers on the promise of its subtle and effective opening single, by the end of 2026 he could be edging out Taylor Swift as the reigning superstar of the age.