Zayn Malik, on track to be the first member of One Direction to launch a solo career in a post-1D world, recently sat down and got very high with Billboard’s Chris Martins. With his beautiful piercing eyes “getting more slit-like as the night [progressed],” Malik revealed that he no longer has any contact with the boy band he left in March of 2015. Also (for your own personal interest), he says he likes “chunky girls” with “opinions.”
In the profile, Martins writes:
Looking ahead to his debut LP — and the much-fretted-over hiatus that 1D intends to begin in March — Malik downplays any rivalry between himself and his old mates. “There are no sides to pick,” he says. “We’re not going head-to-head.”
Still, Malik’s not sure he’ll have “four friends for life,” as he wrote when he quit. “The truth of it is,” he says carefully, “you can think one thing about a situation and the total opposite can happen. I had every intention of remaining friends with everybody, but I guess certain phone numbers have changed and I haven’t received calls from a lot of people. I’ve reached out to a few of them and not got a reply. Certain people have pride issues, but it’s stuff you overcome in time.”
There’s a lot of buzz surrounding Malik’s rebirth as an artist. He is working with producer James “Malay” Ho (who has also worked with Frank Ocean) and is currently creating music that’s more inspired by R&B and hip hop than the vanilla stadium-pop anthems released by One Direction:
When it comes to Made in the A.M., the fifth and perhaps final 1D album, recorded without him and released about two weeks before our talk, Malik admits he hasn’t even heard it. “Nah,” he says. “I’ll be honest. I thought the first single was quite cool. I heard the second single and” — he screws up his face — “yeah, I didn’t buy the album.”
“I genuinely enjoyed [the band] and did whatever I could to be myself within that, but it’s just not where I sit as a musician,” he says earlier in the interview. “The other boys’ taste was generally indie rock. It’s good music, but I don’t fuck with it. That was never cool where I was from.”