There has been a lot of silly chatter amongst One Direction fans about how suspicious it was that Zayn Malik had not wished his former bandmates good luck with their new album 'Made in the A.M.' [review], released last Friday.
Well, the answer may be because he was preparing to launch his own solo career sooner than you think.
Since signing to RCA earlier this year, Malik conducted his first major interview as a solo artist with magazine The Fader, which came with a promo video of him riding a motorbike through the woods. In the clip, you can hear a snippet of his debut single 'Befour', and it sounds pretty far removed from bubblegum pop.
In the Fader interview, Malik said: "I don’t feel like people really know what I’m going to give them, musically. And once they hear it, I feel like they will understand me a little bit more, and they’ll understand why I did what I did, and why I left the band, and why I had to write this shit down. Because for five—not even for five years, for ten years, this album has been in my brain, and it’s just been there, sat with me, needing to be out."
During the clip, he says that listening to Bollywood records and the '90s r'n'b records in his dad's '90s collection had an influence on his album, adding "It is a nice feeling to come out of a place where you are being told what to do and to behave a certain way, just because of certain expectations or certain things that people wanna see."
Watch it below:
