Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session 075

The entire article has been added to the Press Library or you can read it at the Nylon website.

Zayn Malik looks, for a change, happy to be here. “Here” being the lofted dressing room of a photo studio, next to a table with a few empty immunity-shot bottles and a cheese plate, gamely participating in an interview before a shoot. There is not a jittery knee in sight, no half-mumbled thoughts to decode. He is chatty, speaking in full, booming paragraphs that are too loose to be rehearsed. He is open, freely bringing up One Direction and his exes by name. And it all comes out in his rich Yorkshire accent, which melts vowels down to their core and treats consonants as mere suggestions.

He is doing all the extroversive chores you have to do to get your new music — in this case, a new country-flavored album called Room Under the Stairs, out May 17 — heard by people. For some musicians, this is a low and unremarkable bar to clear. For Zayn, who was so tormented by the grind of pop stardom that he quit his boy band at the height of its power, refused most aspects of “promo,” never toured, barely performed live, and regularly ghosted journalists, it feels like a revelation. This new Zayn does not ghost me. He says goodbye with an endearingly clumsy hug. Then he comes up to me again later with his manager in tow because they realized the cheese plate was a little pungent, and, well, if I smelled anything? “It wasn’t me!” Zayn says with eye-popping exuberance. He is headed outside for a smoke break, so he has thrown on a leather jacket that he wears with the virtuosic ease only former teen idols possess. If you saw him, you simply would give up on ever trying to pull one off yourself.

Fatherhood — it changes people. Zayn was 27 when he became a dad to Khai, his daughter with ex-partner Gigi Hadid in September 2020. Even for those in the most enviable of tax brackets, parenthood and a pandemic have a way of rearranging your priorities. Being a tortured artist who only sticks his head out of his cave every few years starts to look different when somebody’s depending on you. (Private school is expensive, I joke. “Yeah, no, there’s a lifestyle to upkeep, definitely,” he answers, not joking.) It triggers a domino effect of responsibility. “I was very much this one-sided brain when it came to being an artist: ‘All I care about is the art!’” Zayn says. Not anymore. He goes on a small tangent about merch — isn’t it strange how it’s always the most basic stuff that does well? “There’s been so many times I would like to do things that are a little bit cooler, a bit more artistic,” he says. “The statistics don’t lie: If my face is on it, it sells way better.”

Speaking of numbers: Zayn cares about them a little more than he thought. Since declaring his independence with his chart-topping 2016 single “Pillowtalk,” a power ballad about having sex so loud you piss off your neighbors, he has learned how fickle attention spans are in the streaming economy. His 2018 double album, Icarus Falls, had some hits, but it didn’t chart so well, and 2021’s leaner Nobody Is Listening mostly flew under the radar. “It didn’t get the attention it deserved,” he says. “I ironically called it Nobody Is Listening too! And nobody was!” he adds, laughing. “You can’t just put the work out and expect people to go find it. The way the world works now, everyone’s connected, and you need to be a part of it.” (He is not the only elusive artist coming to this conclusion: Even Beyoncé — Beyoncé! — is doing meet-and-greets and making influencer content.)