There is a certain group of women who walk around every day remembering exactly where they were when they found out the devastating, earth-shattering news: Zayn Malik quit One Direction.
The year was 2015. The air was frigid with the last stubborn breaths of an Ohio winter refusing to yield to spring, and I was in 8th-period Spanish class. A gaggle of girls cried softly in the back of the room.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Zayn left 1D,” they said, holding onto each other as if the world itself had cracked beneath their feet.
The world would never be the same. But life went on, and we middle school girls had to grow up.
In the years since, those old 1D emotions have been bubbling back to the surface. And when Liam Payne passed away almost one year ago, the fandom felt a shocking new type of heartbreak.
At the time of Zayn’s exit, Louis and Zayn were the only two members sharing a dressing room—something Louis saw as a small testament to their friendship. “I think if he’d told me, I would’ve tried to talk him into staying,” he said. “And that’s probably why he didn’t.”
Louis described the room that day as having a kind of emptiness. “We all knew where it was going,” he said. The “hiatus” had been pitched with no timeline, just a hollow word meant to soothe millions of teenage girls’ extremely crushable hearts. “I don’t think the person involved was brave enough to answer that question,” he added. “But we knew the reality.”
And the reality was true: One Direction was never coming back, and neither were we, with our tween naïveté and burner fan accounts. All good things must come to an end…Unless?
On Wednesday, as part of his press tour, Louis revealed on the Audacy Check-In podcast that there are “loads” of unreleased One Direction songs. Loads.
“There’s a couple that got leaked over the years, maybe like three or four, but, um, there’s loads, loads and loads…,” he said. “The songs were probably not good enough to make the record at the time, you know, probably still good songs, but there’s probably close to like, I don’t know, 50, 60 songs like that.”
Fifty to sixty songs?!?! FREE THEM!!! It pains my inner middle school child to imagine these songs living on a hard drive in a storage closet, collecting dust. After all this time, we deserve our restitution.
Louis is clearly leaning into the 1D lore to help his new songs sell, and I think that’s his right. (Better than trying out an acting career, imo.) I think the reality of this boy band was far too traumatic for our younger selves to fully process. In a 2021 interview—also on The Diary of a CEO podcast—Liam revealed that the boys had virtually no freedom, shepherded from stage to car to hotel room, separated and locked away in their rooms—all of which Louis confirmed. So yes, it was traumatic as hell, even without the endless Larry theories and fanfictions lurking in the background.
We’ll see what else gets unpacked on Louis and Zayn’s road trip, set to release in 2026. If I were one of the most famous teenagers in the world, trapped in a five-member boy band, I’d be unpacking that baggage for life.
In the end, every generation of girls deserves its own life-altering boy band with life-altering boy band drama. Wherever those girls I went to middle school with are, I hope they’ve heard the news, and I hope they still know they’re ~beautifulllll~. Would it be weird to contact them?
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