And that’s a wrap. With Liam Payne’s recent release of "Strip That Down", we now have at least one solo track from each former member of One Direction. And so we have the beginnings of five very different solo careers. What a time to be alive.
In March 2015, Zayn Malik announced that he would leave the band to “be a normal 22-year-old” and have some “private time away from the spotlight”. He was, as we all remember, spotted at a recording studio days later, which exposed his plan: to sneak-launch his solo career while the other boys were still touring as a four-man band. It was a turbulent time for 1D fans who, frankly, always thought the breakaway artist of the group was going to be Harry Styles (as it turned out, Styles was too sweet a munchkin to abandon his buddies in pursuit of solo fame, so he waited). Time passed, the remaining 1D foursome toured and released one final album, and inevitably split. A celebrity baby, a death in the family and a very famous haircut later, the boys started releasing their own work.
Now that we’ve got them all, it’s only natural to rank them in terms of musical merit, lyrical clout and overall quality. You could say that, in ranking the first solo tracks of these young men, we are simultaneously ranking their prospects of future solo success. Without further ado…
5. Liam Payne "Strip That Down "
Oof. This one’s a real clanger. The song was written with Ed Sheeran, who seems to be fast running out of his trademark whimsy and whose current level of fame outweighs his actual talent. It features rap by Quavo, who does very little to redeem the song. The whole track sounds like a garish identity crisis for Payne, who seems to have released it purely to notify his young fans that he is an adult man who engages in sexual intercourse. Apparently, he enjoys it when women “grind”, “hit the ground”, “swing that round” and “strip that down”. Obviously, Payne feels liberated now that he doesn’t have to maintain a peppy 1D image and he’d like to send the world an aggressively heterosexual memo that he’s a beast on the dance floor. Which is odd, considering he’s in a monogamous relationship/ possible secret marriage with Cheryl Tweedy, and he just became a father. A classic acoustic Sheeran ballad would have made more sense with his extremely public personal life but Payne wanted to get back to his, ah, R&B roots. Payne has since said he “nearly didn’t go solo”. Perhaps that would have been for the best.
4. Louis Tomlinson "Just Hold On "
Sweet Louis Tomlinson did a live performance of his song, "Just Hold On", on The X Factor the week his mama died. He sung it in tribute to her, so lyrics like “the sun goes down and it comes back up, the world, it turns no matter what” and “if it all goes wrong, darling, just hold on” took on a very sad meaning. Sentimentality aside, this is not a great song. It’s performed with Steve Aoki and overall, it’s mediocre at best. A boppy, catchy sort of thing, it doesn’t particularly show off Tomlinson’s vocals or give us any great indication of what he wants to do stylistically with his music. It’s a bland, fairly generic pop song that feels as though it could’ve been knocked together in a couple of hours between mates. I’d say the fact that Tomlinson performed it live on The X Factor is a bigger clue to his future career: truthfully, he seems better suited to a spot at the judge’s desk beside his buddy/ mentor Simon Cowell than to a solo pop career. And he has the sweet nature to be a genuinely good mentor to some kids with big dreams.
3. Niall Horan "This Town "
Niall Horan’s the only one who really released a song that One Direction could feasibly have recorded. "This Town" sounds a lot like some of 1D’s softer, more sentimental ballads like "Stockholm Syndrome" or "Little Things". It’s gentle, stripped-back pop that allows Horan to show off sweet vocals and a little guitar-playing. The clip he released with the song is simple: black and white, just Niall Horan sitting on a chair in a recording studio with his guitar, singing straight to his fans. It’s perhaps the sincerest debut among the boys – almost like he’s saying he doesn’t need the back-up, the autotune, the sexed-up lyrics or the artifice of anyone else. Just give him a guitar and he’ll sing to you, gurrrl. It’s a sweet, Sheeran-esque start.
2. Zayn Malik "Pillow Talk "
Much like Liam Payne, Zayn Malik went hyper-sexual with his solo debut, singing about “fucking and fighting” in bed all day at a time when his relationship with supermodel Gigi Hadid was seriously big news. The only difference between Payne and Malik is that Malik’s track is good. It’s very good. It’s everything I imagine Malik has wanted to do musically the whole time he’s been making wholesome pop with 1D. It’s sexy and risqué, with a hip-hop beat he’s probably been dying to break into for years. This is the kind of track you can actually dance to, or work out to. It’s the perfect track to set Zayn Malik apart from his 1D bandmates and start a fresh chapter of his career. It doesn’t sound anything like a 1D song, and I think that was the whole point. This is Malik, screaming and tossing his perfectly peroxided head and saying: take me seriously, music industry, for I no longer do endearing banter on stage with four other young men. This is the real Zayn, and the real Zayn is sex.
1. Harry Styles "Sign of the Times "
Real talk: "Sign of the Times" is a great song. It’s an exquisite, soft rock-pop ballad that hints at a seriously promising solo career for Styles. It’s enigmatic, romantic and beautifully written. Styles admitted to James Corden during his Carpool Karaoke skit that sometimes he cries when he performs it – but “in a cool way”. It is a song to cry to – it’s deeply melancholy and yet there’s something urgent to it. To me, it’s everything we hoped we’d get from a Styles debut: delicate lyrics, moody atmosphere, flashes of Bowie, moments of Jagger and a catchy sentimentality that only Styles can get away with. It showcases his voice – sometimes soft, sometimes throaty, with a killer falsetto refrain. His live performance on Corden’s Late Late Show was devastatingly good but that’s no real surprise to Styles admirers, who have long known how great he sounds live. In the track’s 5 minutes 41 seconds, Styles proves that he is the one to watch. On the rest of his self-titled album, he proves he's the breakout star we always wanted him to be.
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