“How about them Knicks, huh?” a mid-strut Harry Styles asked the packed Madison Square Garden crowd on Wednesday night (Aug. 26), midway through opening song “Dance No More,” to a predictably roaring response. “How about them Knicks, huh?”
Forget about the Knicks. Great championship run and all — first in 53 years, good job by them — but their parade was two months ago at this point, and they ain’t been back to MSG since. For the next two months, the World’s Most Famous Arena is officially Harry’s House.
Styles appeared on stage in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday for the first of his 30 — yes, that’s a 3 and then a 0 — consecutive gigs at MSG, as part of his current Together, Together tour, taking him all the way up through Halloween (and well into the start of next NBA season). And he may have been anxious to be there, as he and his band couldn’t even wait till the end of opener Jamie xx’s DJ set to join them, flowing right from the producer’s set into their own.
Playing in the round — really, in the oval, as the light-up stage Styles and his band performed on was more oblong to match the dimensions of the floor — allowed the pop-rock superstar to really harness the energy of the sold-out, packed-out crowd. And he gave it back to them, with the help of a totally reordered setlist from the 31 dates he’d previously played on Together, Together, including a handful of fan favorites making their first appearance.
A couple of those songs got completely new arrangements, too. Perhaps drawing extra inspiration from being in the city of Studio 54, Styles amped up the disco not just for the songs from his clubbier new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., but also for a couple less-dancefloor-obvious older tracks. (Styles’ 2017 self-titled first album was the biggest beneficiary of the new set ordering — now tied with 2023’s Grammy-winning Harry’s House for the second-most-played album with four tracks — though fans who came to Styles from his first group might have left slightly disappointed by the total lack of One Direction representation.)
Even with an updated sound and wardrobe, Styles is hardly the most natural or obvious of disco dons — he comes to the genre through more left-field NYC dance-rock greats like Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem, drawing physical inspiration their herky-jerky energy, while largely bypassing the manic anxiety that fuels those bands’ signature jams as much as any four-on-the-flour thumping. He also seems to currently have precious little interest in the decadence that drove the scene in its heyday, with his performance as PG-rated as you might expect from a show where the most common merch item found in the audience was a RESPECT YOUR MOTHER T-shirt.
Nonetheless, Styles does understand dance’s power to galvanize and unify, which was on full display throughout Wednesday’s show. The set’s most cathartic and satisfying moments came Styles at the center of his band mid-full disco freakout, summoning a storm of lightning and glitter and fully zapping their gleefully electrified frontman. Whether the kids in the audience got the cleverly laid nods to indie-dance anthems like “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” or “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” probably doesn’t matter as much as them potentially feeling the sensation of their entire essence being bass-bombed along with 20,000 of their new closest friends, and leaving the building vibrating on a totally new frequency. For some in the building on Wednesday, it will undoubtedly be the beginning of a lifelong pursuit of discoing as often as possible.
Or at least until the Knicks’ next playoff run. Here were the six best moments from Harry Styles’ first visit to MSG since 2022 — one down, 29 to go. (And yes, they do include a Dolly Parton tribute.)
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By God, That’s Harry’s Music!
For his entrance in a building that’s hosted countless wrestling events over the years, it perhaps makes sense that Harry Styles and his band would take the crowd largely by surprise with their entrance. They walked out during the final song (“Life”) of opener Jamie xx’s DJ set, with Styles’ horn section leading the way and the frontman himself coming out last, not allowing any of the energy the producer had built up during his thumping set to dissipate before launching into their own performance. In other words, if you were hoping to get a drink or have “a wee” in between sets (as Styles would later put it), tough luck: It was already time to disco.
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Kiss the MSG Floor, But Maybe Not All the Time
After his opening run took him through Harry’s House crowd-pleaser “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” Styles took a minute to pay a tribute to his iconic host venue by recalling how that morning, he’d been reminded of something he’d done when he first visited MSG as an 18-year-old — kissing the World’s Most Famous Arena’s floor. “Since then, we’ve learned a lot about germs — so I wouldn’t be caught dead kissing the floor these days with my pathetic immune system,” Styles joked. “However it is not lost on me what it means to be playing here… I am thrilled to know that even then it was not lost on me either.”
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Harry’s New York Secret
About 1/3 of the way into his set, Styles offered to let the crowd in “on a little secret” — and reveal his favorite thing about New York City. But if anyone was hoping the superstar’s new dance fascination would lead him to playing tastemaker for one of the city’s cool new underground clubs, they instead got a far more boyish answer: “You can get a slice of pizza any time of the night.” However, based on the number of folks in sequined attire and Together, Together shirts at nearby 6th Avenue’s Quality Pizza after the show — perhaps those who, like this writer, had planned to grab a bite between sets before learning no such break would be coming — Styles might’ve been onto something there.
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A Disco “Kiwi” K.O.
He hadn’t played it on any of his Together, Together dates so far — but surely there was no way Harry Styles was gonna come to Madison Square Garden and not play his longtime signature rocker “Kiwi,” right? Sure enough, he sent the building into a frenzy halfway through his set by launching into the opening lyrics of the garage-rock rave-up. But there would be a twist this time — instead of exploding into the song’s typical pounding drums and pummeling guitars during the chorus, the refrain rechanneled its energy to a discofied groove that called back to LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House.” And that was only the beginning: The beat exploded from there into a Remain in Light-like cowbell breakdown, then sped all the way up to “I Feel Love” tempo, with Styles and his dancers high kicking their way through the frenzy. It was the night’s most experimental and ambitious dance-rock moment — and also easily its most triumphant.
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Dolly Will Always Love MSG
From Stevie Nicks to Shania Twain, Harry Styles has always given it up to his iconic female pop predecessors — so you know there was no way he was going to let the evening pass without paying some form of tribute to the late Dolly Parton, whose death has rocked the music world since it was announced on Tuesday (Aug. 25). Indeed, during the set’s first encore, after offering his thanks to his band and crew and to the fans themselves, he held a moment to give “special thanks to all the musicians who have inspired me over the years.” And of course, one in particular was on his mind: “Dolly, thank you so much.”
From there, Styles went on to play Parton’s timeless ballad “I Will Always Love You.” Which is not to say he performed it himself — he played Parton’s original 1974 recording, getting through two verses and two choruses (encouraging the crowd to sing along) before fading it out and segueing to his own classic ballad “Sign of the Times.” But the moment was still an appropriately respectful and reverential one for an artist whose incalculable influence on and importance to the past 60 years of popular music was certainly not lost on Styles.
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Styles Brings It All ‘Together’ for the Big Finish
Though it has not proven nearly as enduring a chart hit as Harry’s House advance smash “As It Was,” Kiss lead single “Aperture” has certainly found its place as the climax of his live gig, where he can indulge both his recent love of fiddling around with modular synths and his longtime passion for massive singalong choruses. The “We belong together” refrain to “Aperture” felt particularly undeniable as the culmination of his first MSG gig on this cycle — and the very final song of the night, seamlessly swapping spots with “As It Was” from earlier in the tour. Proof, perhaps, that perhaps the two singles aren’t so different after all?
