Similar Dance Songs You’ll Love

If “Aperture” has you craving more festival-ready bangers based around jutting acid-house synths and feelings of “only love,” you could certainly do a lot worse than this throwback from indie-dance vets Cut Copy. Hazy with positive vibes and likely-suggested-but-non-compulsory chemical intake, 2013’s “Free Your Mind” has the switch-turned-on feel of the best dance anthems, with communal lyrics (“In these arms you’re always welcome/ If you are a sinner or you are a saint”) that no jibe beautifully with Styles’ current pro-kissing, pro-disco agenda. — ANDREW UNTERBERGER

The opening track of the 2013 debut album by Los Angeles duo Classixx contains two of “Aperture”s core elements, in both the leisurely amount of time it takes to build and the sunny warmth that all of the slowly growing synth lines and acid squiggles break open into around the 2:45 mark. While this one is without vocals, the song’s peak moments contain the same blissful release as when Harry first proclaims that “we belong togetherrrr” like he’s praying at the alter of love. If this one speaks to you, take some time to visit, or revisit, the entire Hanging Gardens LP, one of Billboard‘s picks for the best dance albums of 2013. — KATIE BAIN

Speak of belonging together — none of Harry’s U.K. dance-rock predecessors suggested such unity more forcefully or convincingly than Primal Scream, on this centerpiece epic to their 1991 classic LP Screamadelica. The Terry Farley version on the U.S. release, led by lead Screamer Bobby Gillespie’s blissed-out “would ya would ya triiiiiip me?” exhortations, is no doubt the one that Harry goes for at peaktime on karaoke nights. But the real next-level s—t comes with the Andrew Weatherall-dubbed mix on the U.K. release, built around a gratifyingly utopian spoken-word sample from Jessie Jackson’s introduction to the Wattstax festival that Harry and Kid Harpoon were no doubt nodding along to in the studio: “You will hear gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz. All those are just labels — we know that music is music.” — A.U.

“Aperture” and Hot Chip’s “Let Me Be Him” are essentially first cousins, with both tracks placing the vocals — Styles and Hot Chip singer Alexis Taylor’s upper range vocals even sound similar — over a pulsing, intricately designed production. While this one wasn’t a single from the band’s 2012 In Our Heads, the functions as a centerpiece of the album nonetheless, stretching out to nearly eight minutes and ultimately transforming from a low simmer electronic production to a country-coded, vaguely psychedelic comedown track built from twangy guitar and bird chirps. — K.B.

The production on this 2013 track from L.A. outfit The Acid has the same bubbliness of as “Aperture,” and like Styles’ single also contains a deeper level of sound and feeling with its persistent beat. The two songs also both go in a far more ecstatic directions than their earliest moments might indicate, reaching places that make love sound and feel like something holy. — K.B.

The connection between between “Aperture” and “Take Shelter” runs as deeply as the credits, with “Aperture” producer and co-writer Kid Harpoon also co-writing this 2015 song by U.K. artist Olly Alexander’s Years & Years project. While this one has a higher BPM, the melding between pop and dance are present in both, with the choral-esque vocals of “Aperture” containing the same soaring beauty as Alexander’s anthemic runs on “Take Shelter.” — K.B.

An essential indie dance anthem of the early 2010s, “Elevate,” the 2013 single from New York outfit St. Lucia, toes the line between dance and pop in the same fashion as “Aperture,” ultimately becoming much bigger and brassier than Styles’ single but containing the same spirit of lush and lovestruck ebullience. The song was the biggest hit from the band’s album When the Night, which also contains the era-defining singles “Closer Than This” and “September.” — K.B.

As you get deep, you get deep, you get deeper into this thing called dance, you’ll recognize the ecstasy in Fatboy Slim’s massive “Song for Shelter,” which amps up Roland Clark’s own anthem “I Got Deep” with gorgeously sighing synths and a blood-coursing beat that sound like the curtains being opened on a world full of light and possibility. Like “Aperture,” the 2000 song builds gradually to a near-unbearably beatific climax, though unlike Styles’ anthem, it also comes with its own comedown coda: a disembodied, awestruck voice intoning “Under the big bright yellow sun…” And even on a snowy, cloudy, wintery day, you’re right there. — A.U.