January 25, 2026

by Jacob Ganz

Sitting in for our regular critic this week, NPR Music’s editor wrestles with his own ambivalence and one of the first blockbuster singles of 2026.

Stella Blackmon

I'm a professional music listener, so when I tell you that it takes me a frustratingly long time to figure out how I feel about a new song, it's more than idle irritation. I’m surrounded by people who make up their minds quickly — at work, certainly, and also at home. I have commitment issues, but I'm attracted to decisiveness.

On Friday evening, my wife walked into the kitchen while I was making dinner and announced, “You know what song I like? The new Harry Styles single.” Styles had released “Aperture” less than 24 hours earlier. I had listened to it a few times and posted ambivalently about it on NPR Music’s internal message board, but I put it on the stereo in our living room, where we could turn it up loud. She danced. I tried to pay attention to the lyrics. (It was not the first time we have occupied these roles.) I remained impressed but unconvinced.

There’s ambivalence within “Aperture” itself — a refusal, or inability, or maybe lack of interest, in committing fully to a familiar pop style. The restraint Styles displays throughout the track is both thrilling and mildly bewildering. The first new music he’s released since his Grammy-winning Harry’s House, it’s a five-minute-long club-inspired percolator. It builds deliberately to a line in the chorus that Styles will no doubt lean on for stadium singalongs on his upcoming tour and print on merch that fans will take home from those shows. I love the way it sounds muted but insistent, rubbery bounce and cardboard scratch. I dig the delicate touches of hand-played instruments and static that emerge from those oscillating synths and muffled drums. I respect its slow build, that it takes a whole minute to kick in and another to finally reach that chorus, but find it enervating that it then spends another three minutes vibrating pleasantly while revving up for a blast into the stratosphere that never arrives. Styles sings like he’s having trouble getting out of bed, though my wife hears something alluring in his slouch.

I couldn’t match her embrace of “Aperture,” but I couldn’t argue against it either. To my ears, it sounds like Styles is also trying to have it both ways: To demonstrate an appreciation for music that gets played in small, sweaty rooms without inhibiting the possibility of repeating his massive pop successes of the past. Is this a good thing? I can’t make up my mind.

***

There’s a word that in-the-know movie people use to describe the month of new releases at the start of each year, after the flood of highbrow, awards-bait slows: Dumpuary. The films that get, well, dumped into theaters during this time aren’t necessarily bad, but they aren’t respectable. Their characters don’t display good taste, and the films don’t confer it on their audiences. Movies like Greenland 2: Migration and Primate, two of this year’s entries, are playing to more fevered impulses. They’re pop, and it’s easy to think that in the best of circumstances they’re pure fizz, without seriousness, even when characters solemnly face down grave threats to humanity.

With Oscar hopefuls still holding onto many screens, going to the movies in January feels like a choice between virtue and vice, health food and hot wings. But there was a work of art that helped me reconcile my internal conflict, and it also happened to come out in the last week. Obviously, it was a critic’s top 25 list. (Oh the enviable certainty!)

When I say "work of art" and "top 25 list," I’m not exaggerating. David Ehrlich writes movie reviews for the website Indiewire, but he’s also a skilled and sensitive filmmaker. For over a decade, he’s released annual lists of his favorite films in the form of intricately edited video countdowns. The format is always the same (and shares some qualities with “Aperture,” come to think of it): “The 25 Best Films of 2025” is long, full of echoes and repetitions and surprising moments of humanity and violence. It begins, as do all of Ehrlich’s “25 Best Films” videos, with an extended intro. There’s little dialogue in his videos; instead, they are full of pop songs — each one featured in a film released during the year under review — that score a wild and meticulous pileup of moments from his top 25 and beyond.

It’s the beyond that brought me back to my feeling of ambivalence in the face of new songs, and helped me find some peace with it. One of the joys of Ehrlich’s videos is the way he pulls similar shots from different movies — an actor running or turning to face the camera or dancing or throwing a punch — and stitches them together until they distill the act of moviemaking into something simple but joltingly pure: human movement locked in sync with sound. These moments can be tiny, and they can, he’s telling us, come from blockbusters as well as tiny oddities, critics’ faves and big budget debacles. I look forward to his videos every January, and return to them over and over again. They have helped to attach certain images — from films I love and ones I don’t care for at all — to an unambivalently ecstatic feeling in my memory.

Perfect moments are present in mediocre songs too. And ones that remain an arms length from greatness. There are enough moments in “Aperture” to keep me listening. To keep me thinking. To get me talking with the person I love about what she thinks about it. Does that mean it’s good? I dunno. Maybe ambivalence is good enough.

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