Harry Styles Makes a Triumphant Comeback in Amsterdam Tour Opener

At last, the words that the world has waited three years to hear: “Good evening—my name is Harry. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here with you this evening. This is Night One of the Together, Together Tour.” Harry Styles is back, all right. His Saturday-night blowout in Amsterdam officially kicked off the first Harry tour season since his record-breaking Love On Tour signed off in July 2023—an unthinkably long layoff for the ultimate mega–pop crowd-crusher. As he quipped early in the night, “I got older and the stage got bigger.”

Harry celebrated the start of his massive new Together, Together run with a crowd of 56,000 frenzied fans. Nobody could say this boy wasn’t missed. Walking around Amsterdam the previous couple of days, you could tell which people were in town for the Harry show, just by their eyes. They were coming out of the cage and out for blood.

And so was Harry, who made it a comeback triumph. You couldn’t miss how hungry he was to be back onstage, face to face with his people. It was the kind of pop spectacle that leaves feathers all over the floor and hysteria lingering in the air. He focused on the tunes from his new album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. These songs were designed for the live show—hearing them in a giant room full of strangers is the way they were always meant to be experienced. His band has expanded, with horns, dancers, back-up singers, and—for some songs—a string section, with nearly 20 musicians onstage. 

“None of these songs would exist if it wasn’t about being open to things and letting things enter your life,” he told the crowd. “Sometimes to put your phone down and go out for a night can change your life. It actually sounds silly, but it’s true. It changed MY life. And YOU’VE changed my life, over and over again.”

If anyone needed proof, one of the countless peaks of this show: “Treat People With Kindness,” a song nobody saw coming, but one that exploded into a jubilant sing-along—the anthem that made the fans on the floor throw their bags and coats in a pile so they could join hands and dance in a witchy circle around it. Harry turned it into an Eighties mash-up with the Talking Heads’ classic “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody),” singing the whole first verse. (“Less we say about it the better / Make it up as we go along”—now there’s a Harry sentiment.)

The band elevated the tune into a global groove full of West African soukous and South African mbaqanga, as the horn section blasted the riff from Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” It summed up Harry’s daft ambition as well as his warmth—the handiwork of a madman who couldn’t wait to jump back onstage and start showing off.

It was the start of a 10-night run at Amsterdam’s Johan Cruijff Arena. The 67-date tour has Harry doing residencies in seven cities around the globe, through the end of 2026. After Amsterdam, it’s London (12 nights at Wembley Stadium), São Paulo, Mexico City, New York, Melbourne, and Sydney. His only U.S. dates are his 30-night stand at NYC’s Madison Square Garden, where he already has a banner hanging to commemorate his last stand there with 15 sold-out shows.

He spent much of the night elaborating his concept for KissCo, inspired by dancing till dawn in Berlin’s electro clubs. “The whole reason we’re on this tour,” he explained at the start of the night, “the whole reason I made this last album, is about being together, sharing moments together, having fun together. And that’s what we want to do here tonight. I challenge you to have as much fun as I’m going to have.” 

The gigantic stage had one catwalk down the middle, but a much longer one that stretched all across the floor, so he could get up close and personal with the audience in every corner of the room. Despite the name, Johan Cruijff Arena is a gargantuan football stadium. (The home team is AFC Ajax, so a banner outside declared, “Ajax All The Time, Disco Occasionally.”) The vastness of this stage made it clear why he’s doing these residencies instead of lugging it from town to town—in terms of size it’s comparable to the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound.

Harry spent half the show on the catwalk—the sheer amount of running he did all night was comparable to the Berlin and Tokyo Marathons combined. For the finale “As It Was,” after he’d already been dancing for two hours, he raced three bonus laps all the way around the stadium. (His Runner’s World pal Haruki Murakami would be proud.) On previous tours, Harry’s catwalks had steps for him to climb—a comical sight, because he always ignored the stairs and just leaped right over them. But these runways have no steps—nothing to slow him down.

Harry wore a blue shirt with a kaleidoscopic necktie and black slacks, accessorized at first with a red leather jacket. The night began with his new walk-on theme: Elvis Presley’s 1972 rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” It was the night’s first Paul Simon tribute, but definitely not the last. It was a fitting choice, since one of his key KissCo inspirations was playing his childhood faves Simon & Garfunkel for a friend who’d never heard them before, as her joy reminded him of how he first fell in love with music. It led to a video where he walks alone in the garden as a female voice asks over the phone, “Harry, are you coming out tonight?” He took the stage with the new “Are You Listening Yet?” He let the crowd take over to sing the lines, “If you must join a movement, make sure there’s dancing”—a motto for the night.

The show was expertly paced, with loads of familiar hits up front to set the mood—the collective serotonin rush really hit when he picked up the guitar for the second song, the Fine Line California-sunshine anthem “Golden.” The show’s “Act One,” as he called it, had sure shots like “Adore You,” “Music For a Sushi Restaurant,” and “Watermelon Sugar.” The first half was essentially the Kiss All the Time part—then came the disco. It combined the intimate warmth of his Fine Line shows with the dance-floor glitz of his Harry’s House tour.

He sat at the piano for the knockout ballad “Coming Up Roses,” with the string section, letting the audience carry the wordless singing at the end. It cued an orchestral version of one of the night’s crowd-slaying surprises, the heartbreak ballad “Fine Line.” It’s a fan fave he left unplayed for most of the Harry’s House era, reviving it only in the final two months of Love on Tour.

“This is a song I used to play at the end of the show,” Harry said before “Fine Line,” holding his blue acoustic “galaxy guitar.” “Because it felt like a song about the end of something.” That was enough to trigger loud gasps of pain from people who suddenly realized what was coming. (The fan in front of me told her friend, “He’s SO mean!”) “But actually,” Harry added, “being in rooms like this, I’m more hopeful than ever, and it feels like the beginning of something. So it’s gonna end what we like to call ‘Act One.’ And then we’re gonna start dancing,” adding, “Here is a song for when you get home.” But when he hit his first guitar strum for “Fine Line,” it was basically pouring fresh blood into a shark pool. 

The Act Two dance party blitzed through most of the new album, blazing with “we want to dance with all our friends” energy. If you’re one of the many Harry fans who had trouble connecting with KissCo, by far his most divisive album, the songs truly explode live, especially bangers like “Ready Steady Go” and “Pop.”  “Italian Girls” is a new techno-style instrumental jam, flowing into “American Girls.” “Taste Back” brought the Nineties rave flavor with a snippet of Underworld’s lager-lager-lager classic “Born Slippy.” 

“Dance No More” began with an intricate routine for Harry and two of his dancers, sashaying down the catwalk to the intro from the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” “Carla’s Song” (inspired by the real-life friend who he turned on to Simon & Garfunkel) turned into a medley with the Harry’s House highlight “Satellite,” a perfect pair. Hearing “Aperture” take off with the live band, with 56,000 voices singing the “ah-ah-ah-ah” synthesizer throb out loud–it couldn’t be a more succinct mission statement for everything he’s trying to say in these songs.

The audience wore more neckties than feather boas, though plenty of those. (There were also a few Liam Payne shirts, a poignant sight.) Many wore shirts that said “Sted Sarandos,” the pseudonym Harry used to run the Berlin Marathon last year. He kept bantering with the fans, with his usual chatty crowd work, helping one fan locate her lost mother. (“Theresa’s mum, are you here?”) Best fan sign: “A bird just shat on my head on the way here can I have a set list?” Hope she got one.

For a star who’s been shy about doing interviews lately, he sure does love to wax eloquent about the philosophical premise of KissCo and the whole Together, Together show. “I think we live in a time where it doesn’t seem very cool sometimes to try,” he said. “But I think trying is the coolest thing you can do. When I’m in these rooms with you, I see the way that you treat each other and you TRY with each other—you dance with a friend, you dance with a stranger. That’s what this is all about. It’s about being open to people, being open with your friends, being open with strangers.”

He hit that theme over and over—the importance of music as a communal experience. “I want to say thank you to all my friends who took me out dancing the last couple of years,” he added toward the end. “And all the strangers who had to dance with me.” The crowd was feeling his words deep. “I think in a world where we’re surrounded by so much noise, wherever it is—if it’s online or in your life, it happens to all of us and it affects all of us.” But he added, “I want you to feel what this feels like, to be in this room with a bunch of people who love you tonight, and remind you that the only thing to do is live and exist with your integrity and your respect and your dignity.”

Seeing Bruce Springsteen and Harry Styles in the same week is such a revelation of the power of live music. Two very different shows, with very different moods, but two inspirational nights that prove there is no substitute for human enthusiasm—the more ridiculous the better. Both shows demonstrated the miracles that can only happen in a room full of crazed music fanatics, in the face-to-face confrontation between a performer and an audience, when they’re both equally possessed by that unkillable, irrational, passionate, and downright dangerous lust for music. Watching these two showmen work so absurdly hard to prove it all night—and watching audiences live up to that challenge and then some—well, it’s a timely reminder of why, even in our era of blue-dot fever and robber-baron ticket monopolies, live music remains a humane ecstasy that’s always worth showing up for.

For the encore, the string section returned for “Matilda,” in a lush new arrangement. It’s always so poignant to see that song’s impact on an audience, as clusters of friends huddled to weep and sing. (Guitarist Mitch Rowland told Rolling Stone he’s never been able to play “Matilda” facing the audience, because the emotion’s too intense to witness—and he still can’t.) He brought down the house with “Sign of the Times,” the glam-soul piano ballad that began his solo career after One Direction and opened up his future. “As It Was,” his biggest hit, was the inevitable finale. So why did Harry feel the need to climax the song by racing three extra loops around the entire floor? (“Because he’s insane” is an acceptable answer.)

The show was over, but nobody wanted to leave, even after the house lights came up. The exit music was already playing: in a real Eighties power move, it was a deep cut from synth-pop legends Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark, “Of All The Things We’ve Made.” That led into the jazz-piano classic that used to serve as his longtime walk-on theme, Bill Evans’ 1958 “Peace Piece.” Yet everyone still stood there cheering, or just listening—some no doubt hoping he’d come back to bust out “Kiwi,” his longtime show-closer (always unleashing the most awesomely violent moshpit chaos) but most simply soaking in the communal atmosphere. After three years, it was a feast of something everyone had been starving for, even more than we’d realized. The whole night was a long-awaited comeback for both Harry and his people. And both went overboard to make it worth the wait. 

SETLIST:
“Are You Listening Yet?”
“Golden”
“Adore”
“Watermelon Sugar”
“Music for a Sushi Restaurant”
“Taste Back”
“Coming Up Roses” (with strings)
“Fine Line” (with strings)
“Italian Girls” 
“American Girls”
“Keep Driving”
“Ready Steady Go”
“Dance No More”
“Treat People With Kindness”/“This Must Be The Place”
“Pop”
“Season 2 Weight Loss”
“Carla’s Song”/“Satellite”
“Aperture”

ENCORE:
“Matilda” (with strings)
“Sign of the Times” (with strings)
“As It Was”