A Roland TR-909 and a Modular Rig Got Harry Styles’ ‘Aperture’ Moving

The most revealing part of a hit is often the moment it nearly failed to exist. Speaking on Spotify’s Songlore series, Tom Hull, better known as Kid Harpoon, described a session with Harry Styles in which both men had run out of ideas. Styles was at the piano in the live room. Hull was in the next room. The energy was low, and low energy tends to slow songs down.

“When the energy gets low in the studio, the songs get slower,” Hull said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’”

His answer was hardware. Hull brought out a Roland TR-909, a drum machine he calls a work of art, and ran it through an Eventide HS3000 SE Ultraharmonizer, an ’80s digital effects unit. The intention was modest: program something, play with sounds, see whether any of it could lift the room. It could. A synth line followed, then the modular setup, cables patched for twenty minutes without a fixed destination.

At that point Styles came in from the other room. “What are you doing? This is quite good,” Hull remembers him saying. Melodies arrived almost immediately, including the phrase “We belong together.” Both agreed it worked, and a couple of hours later the song was essentially there.

Hull is wary of the language of inspiration. He thinks good things and bad things simply happen. Still, he ranks this among the few moments in his career that felt close to something else, a stretch he describes as hands off the wheel. What remains on the record is a drum machine that is not decoration. It is the reason the session started again.