This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News
Zayn Malik speaks, previews new music
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 18 November 2015
Zayn Malik has done a big interview with Fader, thus cementing his position as the coolest ex-member of One Direction. Or only ex-member of One Direction, as I guess he technically still remains for the moment.
Some highlights of the interview:
• Zayn’s “fired up a spliff” within six paragraphs
• Fans ring his doorbell in the middle of the night hoping he’ll be too tired not to realise he shouldn’t talk to them
• He’s proud to be a Muslim popstar but doesn’t consider himself or want to be a spokesperson for his religion
• The members of One Direction find fan conspiracy theories that they’re in various relationships with each other difficult, because it affects how they act around each other in public
• Zayn himself is slightly perplexed about having been cast as “the mysterious one” but recognises that it helped sell stuff
• If he tried to put some of his own style into a vocal recording in 1D it would be re-recorded “50 times until there was a straight version that was pop, generic as fuck, so they could use that version”
• He “wanted to go home from the beginning”, and then in March woke up one day and realised it was time to do just that
• He’s recorded his album with Frank Ocean producer James ‘Malay’ Ho
• Some of their recording was done on camping trips
• This is where Zayn got into archery
• Zayn is into archery
• He has enough money now, so doesn’t “need you to buy [his solo music] on a mass scale for me to feel satisfied”
Find out about all this and more in the full interview here.
Meanwhile, Malik – as we clearly just said – has now recorded a debut solo album, and you can hear a bit of a new song, called ‘Befour’, in the background of this video that accompanies the Fader interview. A video in which the singer says these words: “As I got older I guess I just started listening to a lot of my dad’s old records, like 90s stuff”. And if that doesn’t make you feel old, well done on being so fucking young, you little shit.