ELLE INDIA – Zayn Malik talks to Ekta Sinha about ‘Nusrat’, ‘Konnakol’, and what it really means to make music on his own terms.
There are artists who arrive with noise, and then there are artists like Zayn Malik, the kind who never really needed to raise his voice to command attention. Some people have presence. Malik has always had pull.

Maybe it’s the voice; that unmistakable falsetto, those impossibly smooth runs, the kind of high note that lingers long after the song is over. Maybe it’s the face that launched a thousand Tumblr pages, the strand of hair that became a pop culture moment, the kind of beauty that made him the blueprint for an entire generation. Or maybe it’s simply that Malik has always moved differently, whether he’s fronting a global tour backed by an all-woman band, or retreating to his farm to spend time with his animals, he has never chased attention. It has always found him.

On Zayn Malik: Paris jacket by Kardo from The Society of Cloth. Linen stripe shirt by Kartik Reasearch.
When the world first met Malik in 2010, he was a teenager from Bradford in a boy band that would go on to define global pop obsession. But even then, there was something distinctly different about him. Not just in the way he looked, but in what that meant: a brown boy in a space that had rarely made room for one, quietly shifting the visual language of pop stardom. And then, of course, there was the voice—silky, controlled, instinctive.

If he has remained lodged in our playlists all these years later, it is because songs like PILLOWTALK and Dusk Till Dawn still feel unmistakably his: intimate, sensual, and emotionally precise. The kind of tracks that resurface without warning and remind you exactly why you fell in love with him in the first place.

And if the rest of the world took a minute to catch on, India never did. We knew early. Before representation became a buzzword, before algorithms told us what to stream, there were girls here replaying his runs, memorising his ad-libs and claiming him in ways that felt both deeply personal and strangely collective.

Fifteen years later, and nearly a decade into his solo career, Malik returns to ELLE India, where he first made history in 2018 with his first-ever Indian magazine cover. There’s no forced “full circle” narrative here, no overworked nostalgia. If anything, this moment feels less like a return and more like a continuation: the same artist only more settled into himself.

“I don’t feel like I’m at such a different place and point in my career,” he says. “I feel like I’m at a different place and point as a human; I’m developing, growing, and learning from life experiences.”

That distinction feels important. The artistry was never in question. If anything, it is the life around it that now feels more fully aligned.

This year also marks ten years of Mind Of Mine, the album that introduced Malik as a solo artist and gave us PILLOWTALK, LIKE I WOULD, fOoL fOr YoU, and more. “Ten years of anything just reminds me how old I am,” he says, laughing. But there’s pride there, too. “It’s been ten years, and I’m still here doing it, and people are still listening. I feel like I’m still progressing.”

Shot in New York City, this cover captures Malik in what he describes, simply, as a “fun, loving, and chill” era. And that is exactly what it feels like. Not a rebrand. Not retinvention for reinvention’s sake. More like a return, to instinct, to control, to the version of Malik that was always most compelling when he let the work speak first.

“I spend less time getting hung up over thinking, ‘Should I say this? Should I not say this?’” he says. “If it feels real and feels genuine, I just go with it now and wear my heart on my sleeve.” You can hear that ease in the music too. It runs through his fifth studio album, Konnakol—a project named after the South Indian art of vocal percussion. It is not an album that over-explains itself; it simply exists with quiet confidence. When asked what the word Konnakol brings to mind, Malik answers instantly: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

That answer tells you almost everything. Because Nusrat, the opening track on the 15-song album, is inspired by the legendary qawwali maestro—a deeply intentional tribute to a voice that has moved generations across India, Pakistan, and the wider diaspora. But as ever, Malik is not interested in imitation. What he builds instead is something that sits between worlds.

“I got into the studio, booked in for 14 days… the process was trying to create this vision I had in my mind that didn’t exist anywhere else,” he says. “There was no point of reference I could pull from or say, ‘I want it to be like this.’ Even though I was drawing from Konnakol in terms of the technique and bringing in South Asian influences, it was still something I’m proposing to a Western market, and I wanted it to still be R&B but have that flavor.”

The process, for him, was instinctive rather than overdetermined. “I just had to freestyle a bit on the mic and see what came out naturally and build from there,” he continues. “We started with a click, didn’t even have a drum, which gave us the starting point, and built the track around the ad-libs and Konnakol influences, and then wrote over the track in English.”

The result is an album that feels less engineered than inhabited—rhythmic, intimate and deeply rooted in story. “It’s always important for me to bring my culture into things because I feel that’s what makes me, me. There are not many Indian-Pakistani artists here in the West that the world knows, so it makes it unique and individual.”

For Malik, this is not a matter of rediscovery. It is simply continuity. “My culture, heritage, and ethnicity have been very prominent throughout my life,” he says. “I’m mixed race, I’m very aware of it.”

Perhaps that is why his connection with Indian audiences has never felt performative. It was never something he had to lean into. It was already there, in the music he gravitated towards, in the references he carries, in the way he speaks about Indian cinema and sound with genuine admiration.

“Indian and Bollywood references find their way into my life in general,” he says. “I’m always watching Indian films.” (He has a soft spot for Main Hoon Na, a film he says he’d happily be a part of.) “I’m listening to the music—some of the best sound scores in the world, I would say. And I know I’m biased, I partially come from India… but the level of meticulousness that’s conveyed through even the instrument playing is ridiculous, so complex, and it really interests my brain.”

What draws him in, ultimately, is emotion. “I think the thing I really love about Indian music is that it feels like it comes from the soul,” he adds. “This deep connection of using music as a mantra, to get yourself through a situation or an experience you might not be enjoying, music can get you through that. It’s uplifting, it’s positive, it’s about the possibility of love… the idea that when you fall in love, it’s going to be a fairytale. It doesn’t quite work like that in reality, but the idea is nice.”

And perhaps that has always been the essence of Malik, too. Whether he is singing about desire, heartbreak, longing or tenderness, there is a certain emotional texture to it that makes you stay with the song longer than you meant to. The voice will always do what it does—those smooth runs, those impossible notes—but what has always mattered more is the feeling underneath.

Some tracks on Konnakol pushed him harder than others. “Blooming was the one that pushed me the most technically,” he says. “The demo vocalist was unbelievable.” Others arrived with more ease. “Nusrat was the first song I did in the sessions with Malay (record producer, songwriter)… it just snowballed.”

And then there is Met Tonight, the track he points to when asked which song best captures where he is right now. If you want a read on his current state of mind, he suggests, start there. That clarity extends to the way he now thinks about success. When asked whether charts, numbers, and commercial success ever creep into his creative process, Malik is refreshingly candid.

“There’s an awareness there, of course. There’s always a question of ‘Is this going to do well, is it not?’” he says. But it does not stay front and centre for long. “I try not to think about the business of it and just come from a genuine place. I’ve got people on my team that are business heads; they know how the business works, so I leave that to them.”

For him, the boundary is clear. “I’m just a creative… I like singing, I like making music, and expressing myself. So I try to just concentrate on that.” That sense of ease spills into life beyond the studio as well. His daughter, Khai, has converted him into a K-pop listener, and his recent collaboration with BLACKPINK’s JISOO on Eyes Closed only sharpened the crossover appeal. “Yeah, my daughter is a big K-pop fan—she is committed to it,” he says, laughing. “I listen to it a bit myself too, a bit of a guilty pleasure. She’s definitely switched me over.”

When I ask whether another duet with one of Khai’s favourite groups (TWICE) could be on the cards, he grins. “Yeah, never say never. Might have something on the cards, might not. Can’t tell you too much!”

For someone whose life has so often been mythologised online, Malik remains surprisingly clear about what he actually enjoys: a quiet day on the farm, his animals, and the kind of solitude that feels restorative rather than performative. So when asked to choose between a packed studio session and a slow day at home, he doesn’t hesitate. “I never had a packed studio session—it’s not my vibe,” he says. “Nope, definitely a quiet day on the farm.”

And then there is India, a place that has held him for years without ever quite having him in it. “I’ve never been to India in my entire life,” he says. “I had plans to come last year, but work got in the way.” But the desire feels sincere. “I want to go back to the motherland and feel the dirt under my feet.”

Before we wrap, he leaves a message for the Indian fans—many of whom proudly call themselves the Zquads, who have stayed with him through every version of himself. “Thank you so much for all your love and support,” he says. “I’m a guy from England—Bradford—I never thought people in India would ever know who the F I am.”

But of course we did.

Fifteen years in, Zayn Malik’s voice still lands exactly where it needs to be. The feeling still hits. And somehow, without ever seeming to try too hard, so does he.