Niall Horan Is Ready Now
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Niall Horan spent a recent weekend wandering around the East Village. He was in town from London, where he lives, and he took a few days to distract himself from work the way all New Yorkers do: With a long stroll through the city. “I’ve got longtime friends from home that live in New York,” he explains. “I wanted to see them, spend time with them, and my girlfriend came to town. We just hung out and walked around.” With no itinerary in mind, they let the sidewalk lead the way. “You’re always going to walk into a good bar, or a good restaurant, or a taco spot, or a sushi joint or something,” Horan says of his affinity for the area. “It reminds me of London in that way, you can’t really do that in L.A.”
Horan, of course, has a widely recognizable face. In fact, it’s a face—open with blue eyes, a big smile, and a healthy tuft of dishwater blonde hair—that’s been known nearly as long as it ever wasn’t at this point. But here in the Big Apple, most people are moving too quickly to notice and the 29-year-old can usually get by without much fanfare. At most, people do a double-take, but if he focuses straight ahead, an afternoon down on St. Marks Place leaves him feeling recharged. So, where did they go? Horan racks his mind for examples, then grins. He knows he's gotta protect his haunts. “Even if I could think of them, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”
Days later, Horan is in midtown Manhattan. His team is buzzing around a photo set (for these portraits you see here) and he works the room with ease. He’s authoritative, yet calm. Approachable. Horan may be an international pop star, having occupied a rare orbit of fame since One Direction first broke big in 2011, but his temperament is more akin to that of a Vinyasa-yoga instructor. Everyone is welcome in his orbit. It’s a busy day—he’s got a new album on the horizon and a gig as a judge on The Voice to talk up, which means radio visits, interviews, and video shoots—but Horan is not worried about the time crunch. He hums Fleetwood Mac between shots.
On June 9th, Horan will release his third album The Show to an eager fanbase. It’s been three years since his last collection, and the pressure is on. His first solo set rode the wave of breakout single—and quintessential I’m all grown up now pop track—“Slow Hands” in 2017, and three years later, he followed up with Heartbreak Weather. The woozy LP debuted in the Top 5 on the Billboard 200 and showed growth as a lyricist, but with a March 2020 debut, it was a weird as hell time in the world. Attention was hard to hold.
But The Show is ready—and so is Horan. He wants a hit, though he knows better than most that there’s no secret recipe that guarantees one. “These last few months [before the release] is where it gets really tense because I just want to know what people think,” he says. So he does the only thing he can: “I’m keeping everything crossed, let’s put it that way.”
The glittering first single, “Heaven,” arrived in February. On early impressions, it sounds like another cheery love song. But the chipper melody is contradicted by the pensive lyrics, and those who choose to listen closely will find an intimate inner monologue about how life changes. Over the catchy beat he sings, “It’s hard to be a human / So much to put an answer to / But that’s just what we do.” Thematically, The Show follows a similar narrative, with Horan meditating often about growing older and appreciating all that life has to offer. Prior to the COVID shutdown, Horan never had the chance to process his meteoric rise. When he finally did, he says all that thinking made him feel like Kylie Jenner in her 2016 resolutions video. “There was a lot of realizing going on,” he says, laughing at the comparison he draws himself.
“Heaven” has registered well with fans, debuting at Number 4 on the Irish Singles Chart and quickly amassing several million views on Youtube. When Horan and I speak a few weeks later on Zoom, he says that the warm reception hasn’t totally calmed his nerves. “It’s so competitive out there,” he begins. “There’s been such a gap between the first single and album. My team likes it, the people that I worked with like it, but that’s not to say the masses in the world will like it.”
Horan knows what happens when the masses do like something. For six years he traveled the world with his bandmates, Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson, and Liam Payne but that fame came at a steep price. Privacy was no longer an option. Their whereabouts were often posted online, while eagle-eyed fans hunted them down like prey. Crowds gathered, everywhere. Few people in history can understand what that experience feels like, and the five young men learned to become more insular. Seven years after the group’s hiatus, Horan explains that his former bandmates are the only people who fully understand his way of life, and because of that, they keep in touch. “We always try and support each other where we can,” he says. “We’re all texting each other individually, if anyone’s got a song coming out or a thing, even outside of work, we know we have each other.”
Their journey began in 2010 when each then-young hopeful auditioned for The X Factor as a solo artist. Judges saw group potential, mashed them all together, and the rest, as they say, is 70 million records sold. These days, Horan is experiencing a bit of déjà vu as a new judge on NBC’s The Voice, where he scouts talent alongside Chance The Rapper, Kelly Clarson, and Blake Shelton. The experience, he says, is trippy. When he was the one auditioning, Horan fumbled, and as a result, he says eliminating contestants is his greatest difficulty as a judge. “Having people’s future in my hands is something I’ve struggled with,” he says. “I do find that tough, you have to have a level of empathy, especially if you’ve been on the other side.”
But The Voice is also fun, he promises. The four stars’ friendly dynamic bounces off the screen. When they’re not delivering thoughtful notes to the contestants, or trying to win the competition, they can be found messing with each other. (This does, on occasion, happen all at once.) According to Horan, the camaraderie is very much real. “We’re so lucky, because I can’t imagine what it’s like to force a relationship for the camera,” he says. “It’s just nonstop laughing. Our text chain is hilarious, it’s just constant. Blake Shelton is unbelievable every second of the day. [Whether] it’s a gif, a funny joke, or something. He loves winding Kelly up, he gets right under her skin.”
Jokes aside, Horan has a great deal of respect for his costars’ opinions. He previewed “Heaven” for them before the rest of the world heard it, and says he plans to have them listen to the full album soon. Even so, I get the sense that he’s shy about sharing his work. And The Show includes some of Horan’s most vulnerable songwriting. Composed primarily on the piano, this album is an intimate reflection of his life as of late—one he may have been rushed into. Those early years of stardom came at the sacrifice of a typical life. How do you catch up? Or go back? How do you settle into adulthood if you were robbed of your youthful innocence? If Horan were a cynic, The Show might be a different type of album. Instead, he, and it, are focused on gratitude.
In his favorite track, the revealing title track, we hear Horan hope for a future lived with more optimism. The song opens, “If everything was easy and nothing ever broke / if everything was simple how would we know how good we had it?” According to Horan, writing that was an ah-ha moment. It created the structure for the album and also provided a new lease on life. “We do a lot of complaining when we’re living,” he says simply. He wants to enjoy the ride.
Soon Horan will go on a sprawling tour—a journey he admits to loving despite the grueling demands—but before then, he’ll have to let us hear what he’s been working on. On launch day, he plans to process fans’ reactions from the comfort of his bed. It’s a new way of doing things, but he started the habit when “Heaven” was released. “I just opened Twitter like an idiot and went scrolling,” he recalls. “Thankfully, the reaction was amazing but that could have been a sad story.” In years past Horan says he’d let the music charts be the judge, but now, with a project like this, he’s more interested in the public’s opinion. “I wanted to see what the fans were saying,” he explains. “They waited for a long time, and I made them wait, so I wanted to see what was going on.” Something tells me come June they won't be disappointed.
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