Olly Alexander Releases New Single 'When We Kiss'

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" has dropped. It's 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.

Speaking about the new track, Olly Alexander reveals, "'When We Kiss' is an epic love song about a difficult moment in a relationship, when you don't know whether you should break up or if you should stay together forever. I wanted this song to reflect those conflicted feelings, all the pain and ecstasy of loving someone. I believe heartbreak and synthesizers are made for each other and I had the best time making this with my Polari partner Danny L Harle. Our aim was to take the listener on a rapturous journey of heartfelt emotion, from anguish to euphoria and back again."

"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, followed by the album's punchy title track and opener "Polari" which Queerty hailed "pure '80s adrenaline" and "a turbocharged rush that harkens back to early Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson," and closing out the year, the euphoric "Archangel," which Billboard named "Editor's Pick" in their weekly Friday Music Guide, lauding the track's delicate synth-pop and fluffy melodies" as "a promising step toward a more established pop identity."

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.

"In the 'lost gay language' of Polari, "Polari" means 'to speak'," Olly explains. "I was very inspired by how we communicate with each other and what it means to speak a secret language, something I think we all do in some form or another with the people we're close to. In our hyper connected world of fractured communication, it's not easy to trust that anything is what it seems, I felt that a song about vernacular should be as wild and unpredictable as the history of Polari itself. I had such a great time making this bijou song with Danny and taking musical inspiration from the past, the present and the distant future. Please enjoy and thank you for listening!"

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 to connect.