(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Wed 25 March 2026 13:30, UK
There’s no debating it, Harry Styles is the biggest pop star on the planet.
The 12 sold-out Wembley dates and 30 at Madison Square Garden are emphatic proof of that idea, not to mention the general hysteria around his recently released fourth album, Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally.
When that album was announced, I couldn’t help but feel as though I had heard that phrase before – likely in the aisles of B&M, printed on a blank canvas next to the “live, laugh, love” and “press for prosecco” prints. Ultimately, though, I thought a man of Styles’ taste would elude an outcome where the music within the album represented something akin to that.
After all, he’s proven himself to be the tastemaker of a modern generation. Not-so-subtly name-dropping Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks and Paul Simon as annoyingly frequently as your new uni housemate who thinks his copy of Graceland is a first pressing. On his recent albums, he’s gone some way to proving that behind that inspiration lies something of artistic depth, moulding the ideas of his influences into a sound that is his own and thus justifying the mad hype that surrounds him.
But on Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally he has proven otherwise. But the Harry Styles Kool-Aid is seemingly so strong that the music world is either oblivious to his outright plagiarism or just deliberately choosing to ignore it as a means of protecting their one true pop-star, whose affable industry presence does in fact serve as some sort of societal tonic.
But surely, after a brief listen to his single ‘American Girls’, we must all realise that this charade simply cannot go on. As I hear the opening piano chord sequence of the song littered all over social media, largely used to intensify the profundity of someone’s heartfelt reel, I grow increasingly shocked that we are crediting Styles for soundtracking that. Because that’s not his idea, it’s Vini Reilly’s.
As I mentioned, we are all accustomed to Styles harkening in his influences, almost like a musical Pinterest board and ultimately, that has been the root of his charm, which united generations of different music fans. But ‘American Girls’ outrightly uses the same chord sequences of The Durutti Column’s ‘Future Perfect’, backs it up with a nearly similar bass line before drenching it in endless vocal hooks.
Before all you Styles fans sharpen your knives and come for me, defending your honourable pop star on the basis of some sort of artistic coincidence, it’s worth noting that he regularly cited The Durutti Column as an inspiration for this album, supposedly capturing the liberated spirit of dance music, as he recorded in Berlin. Unsurprisingly, he was elusive in his explanations, saying, “It’s kind of like an energy of what I wanted to feel when I was playing” – thus evading any concrete plagiarism claims.
Feeling is a genuinely understandable reference point for anyone embarking on a musical project, harnessing its depths to inspire your own work. But ‘American Girls’ isn’t a feeling so much as a replica, using the obvious transcendence of that iconic piano sequence to produce a more diluted brand of Reilly’s essence.
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