Olly Alexander hits 2025 hard with a love song for the ages. Taken from his forthcoming new album ‘Polari’, ‘When We Kiss’

Monday 13th January 2025

Release date: Out now Label: Polydor

British pop icon Olly Alexander hits 2025 hard with a love song for the ages. Taken from his forthcoming new album ‘Polari’, ‘When We Kiss’ drops alongside another visually arresting Colin Solal Cardo directed video - watch HERE.

A song that’s as much about pain as it is about love. The push-pull of a relationship fraught with tension, lust, need, desire and multiple complexities rooted in nagging questions over the future.

‘When We Kiss’ is the fourth track release to showcase the upcoming album, Polari, due for release next month. The emotive ‘Cupid’s Bow’ led the charge back in October last year, the album’s punchy title track and opener ‘Polari’ followed before the euphoric ‘Archangel’ closed out the year.

Across ‘Polari’ Olly explores themes of desire, intimacy, voyeurism and fate all wrapped up in a pounding club soundscape. Polari was crafted alongside writer and producer Danny L Harle and is a pop album for the ages. Olly Alexander’s first album under his own name takes as its primary inspiration the (almost) lost art of Polari. Originating around Europe and the Romani community as early as the 1600s, this coded slang became in effect a secret language for homosexuals and the stigmatized during the twentieth century. It’s a concept Olly first came across when coming out, and resonated more deeply with when playing Richie in ‘It’s A Sin’, where he grappled with questions about identity, self-expression and community. The kinds of which have always populated British life, and have long been threaded through the history of pop music - you just had to know where to look.

After a decade releasing music as Years & Years, Polari is literally Olly Alexander talking the talk. He bonded with Danny L Harle over a mutual love of 80s club music, that period of uncompromising, avant-garde pop which nonetheless snuck into the mainstream. Polari remained a north star throughout the creative process, a language likewise lacking widespread recognition but still influential in plain sight (see such colloquialisms as “drag”, “naff” and “trade”). The album arrives alongside audio-visual world-building in which Olly is in complete control, from its anarchic Derek Jarman-inspired aesthetic to Olly even writing a short play accompanying its release, full of cowboys, gods, and the occasional music industry exec. And after a long history of secrets and subtext, Polari is ultimately an open and universal pop record about those needs that transcend time, sexuality, and self: what it means to belong, to be loved, and (Polari literally translates as “to talk”) to connect.

The landmark project will hit the road this year 

Posted by Craig Jones