In his first interview in years, Zayn Malik gets into the politics behind his boy band exit

Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, and Harry StylesPhoto: Jason Merritt (Getty Images)

Zayn Malik is talking about One Direction again. In the years immediately following his untimely departure, he had a lot to say about being in the boy band. After a while, he stopped giving interviews at all, until the release of the latest episode of “Call Her Daddy.” The five former X-Factor contestants “got sick of each other” by the time Malik left in 2015, he says. “I look back on it now in a much fonder light than I would’ve as I’d just left. There were great experiences, I had great times with them, but we’d just run our course.”

None of that is news, per se, more like a pretty standard response to putting time and distance between himself and an overwhelming (perhaps traumatizing) experience. What is news is that Malik now says he left the band so abruptly because he smelled blood in the water. “I don’t want to go into too much detail, but there was a lot of politics going on. People were doing certain things. Some people didn’t want to sign contracts, so I knew something was happening,” he says, insinuating another member, or members, of the band were looking to branch out into solo careers.

“I knew something was happening, so I just got ahead of the curve. I was like, ‘I’m just going to get out of here, I think this is done,’” Malik explains. “I just seen it [coming] and I completely selfishly wanted to be the first person to go and make my own record. If I’m being completely honest with you, I was like, ‘I’m going to jump the gun here.’”

One Direction continued as a foursome for a year after Malik left, and until now no one involved with the band has suggested that any of the remaining members were plotting their own escapes as far back as March 2015. So who, exactly, was Malik jumping the gun on?

We can rule out at least one suspect: Louis Tomlinson has said repeatedly that One Direction ending “surprised” him. “When One Direction split up, I was mortified, I was absolutely gutted,” Tomlinson told The Times earlier this year. “I was a bit bitter, I suppose because it just felt like another loss to me. But I’ve a better understanding of things now, and there’s not as much anger. It is what it is.”

Liam Payne is a possibility, though given his struggle to find his footing since the band dissolved, he doesn’t seem like the most likely candidate. (This GQ interview makes it sound like he didn’t have all his ducks in a row coming out of the band, which also counts against him.) Niall Horan is even more likely, given that he is the first of the foursome to release solo music (the single “This Town” in October 2016). Horan claims he was planning to take a couple of years off when the band split, but was simply struck by musical inspiration (per Insider)—your mileage may vary whether you believe that or not.

When it comes down to it, the most likely candidate for Malik’s competitive spirit is Harry Styles. The assuredness with which Styles launched his solo career following the band’s dissolution is evidence of that. He was the first member of One Direction (after Malik) to release a solo album, and has since gone on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year for his third solo project.

Perhaps the most damning evidence that Malik was implicating Styles in his statement is Malik’s own attitude towards his ex-bandmate in his post-1D interviews. “To be honest, I never really spoke to Harry even when I was in the band. So I didn’t really expect that much of a relationship with him,” Malik told Us Weekly in 2017, despite plenty of examples to the contrary.

For Styles’ part, he’s claimed he didn’t share Malik’s desire to get out of the boyband spotlight. “I don’t know if I could say it’s something he shouldn’t have done. I just didn’t feel that way. So, it’s hard for me to condemn it, ’cause I don’t,” he said on The Howard Stern Show (via E! News). “Especially in hindsight looking at it now, the last thing that I would’ve wanted is for him to have stayed there if he didn’t want to be there.”

The truth is, pop groups tend to have a shelf life. It’s not entirely surprising that anybody would have been looking towards a solo future after five years in a reality-television-manufactured boyband. Maybe what Malik picked up on was a natural outgrowth of the boy band phenomenon; or maybe he really did head someone else off by launching his solo career first. We can’t know for sure until one of them starts naming names. Here’s hoping for a 1D tell-all someday.