A decade ago, Louis Tomlinson understood that the odds were against him.
One Direction, the boy band juggernaut of which Tomlinson was one-fifth, had just performed for the final time together in late 2015, capping a mega-selling run that included five albums, 13 top 40 hits and over 100 stadium shows. As the group went on hiatus and its members one-by-one went solo, Tomlinson looked around at his bandmates — Harry Styles, Niall Horan and Liam Payne, as well as Zayn Malik, who had abruptly departed the group in March 2015 — and saw, even in a crowded pop landscape, potential for their individual successes. What he didn’t see was room for his own.
“There might be one or two people from a band that prosper, but history says there’s not normally more than two,” Tomlinson says today in his light South Yorkshire lilt, straightening up his chair. He’s wearing track pants, a relaxed gray button-down, a loose tee that reveals a lower neck tattoo and a disarming grin as he sits up in his chair during a mid-November conversation in Los Angeles. “I always knew Harry was going to go on to do what he’s done — I’m sure he’s superseded his own expectations in the way that he’s taken over the world, but we knew he’s got everything it takes to be a great artist,” he continues. “And Niall, I had a good feeling about too — he’s Irish, he’s lovely, everyone loves him.”
Where did that leave Louis? For his part, Tomlinson had scored solo turns on and co-written some of One Direction’s biggest hits, and as the group’s oldest member, he’d famously served as the plainspoken liaison between the boys and their industry handlers. Yet he’d always been treated as an auxiliary player rather than a breakout star within the group — and with 1D winding down, he wondered if he was already a has-been at age 24. “That was really f–king scary,” Tomlinson, now 34, admits. He tenses up, his effortless cool disappearing for a second. “I was never thinking, ‘I’ll be in that group [of One Direction alumni] that succeeds.’”
While some good times followed for Tomlinson in the subsequent years — like the birth of his son, Freddie, in January 2016 — the period was marked by tragedy. His mother died in 2016, and his sister’s untimely death followed in 2019. The losses contributed to pushing the release of his debut album, the intriguing yet uneven Brit-rock effort Walls, back to 2020, making Tomlinson the last of the One Direction members to make his solo bow. (And of course, tragedy struck again when Payne, his bandmate and close friend, died at the age of 31 in October 2024 — a loss that Tomlinson has said he will “never really accept.”)
Two shows into his first headlining tour in March 2020, it was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. For years, Tomlinson felt snakebit. “You only need two or three things to happen close to each other to start thinking that the world’s against you,” he says. But his sophomore album, 2022’s Faith in the Future, was more vibrant and self-assured, giving Tomlinson his first top 5 entry on the Billboard 200 chart. His second solo tour also had fewer hiccups, and bigger crowds, than his first, with an impressive 314,000 tickets sold and $20.3 million grossed across 38 shows reported to Billboard Boxscore in 2023 and 2024.
Now, Tomlinson has set up the type of year that could lift him from feel-good underdog story to late-blooming star. It starts with How Did I Get Here?, his third album and second for BMG, due out Jan. 23. Preceded by the spiky anthem “Lemonade” and the swaggering shout-along “Palaces,” the project is Tomlinson’s most fully realized solo statement yet, brimming with blissed-out pop hooks as well as the scruffy charm that he radiates in person. Producer Nico Rebscher, who worked with Tomlinson in the U.K. as well as in Costa Rica, says, “With this album, we wanted to achieve something that could be even more suitable for radio, but still has Louis’ DNA in there.”
The album campaign has befitted a pop A-lister — “global and ambitious,” as Tomlinson’s manager Matt Vines puts it — and has included a radio push for “Lemonade,” a Times Square vending machine pop-up and a scavenger hunt for track titles on road signs in Costa Rica. He also joined TikTok, translating the behind-the-scenes flourishes from One Direction’s YouTube days to his current goings-on to the tune of 8 million likes. He’s still feeling out how to use the app: “You’re not going to catch me doing no daft dance… yet,” he says with a smirk.
Wooyoungmi jacket and vest, Adidas pants.
Austin Hargrave
Last fall, Tomlinson headlined Away From Home, his self-curated independent music festival that has visited a new country with each iteration since 2021, and recently served as a launching pad for material from the upcoming album. The fest set the stage for Tomlinson’s biggest solo tour yet, graduating from amphitheaters to arenas in multiple markets when it kicks off in June. “Learnings from Louis’ previous tours allowed us to follow the demand,” says Vines. (Tomlinson is booked globally by Wasserman Music.)
As he kicks off a pivotal year, Tomlinson is braiding his boy band past with his solo future more successfully than ever. Later in 2026, he and Malik will star in a Netflix docuseries, capturing the shared adventure they took across the United States last year (Tomlinson is mum on details, but says of Malik, “It was his idea, actually — I’ll give him credit for that brilliance”). And he hints that his upcoming tour will have a more traditional arena-pop feel — something that could recall the euphoric 1D days.
In a pop landscape in which several artists, from Sabrina Carpenter to Charli xcx to Teddy Swims, are unlocking new levels of success after several years of hard work, Tomlinson is about to play to his biggest solo audiences yet, at a moment when he can better appreciate that achievement. On July 8 — years after counting himself out as a solo star — he will headline New York’s Madison Square Garden, returning to the iconic stage for the first time since One Direction’s performance there in December 2012. “Never in a million f–king years did I think I’d be playing that on my own,” he says.
You seem to be enjoying this album rollout much more than the previous two. What’s different?
The confidence that I’ve built up from the last two tours was vital for me. What I love about those live moments is it doesn’t really leave any room for self-doubt — and I definitely struggled with that, post [One Direction]. But being in those live spaces and delivering night after night, it’s undeniable. So I’m coming into this record revitalized in my confidence. It’s a nice feeling.
After promoting Faith in the Future, did you harness that energy and get right back into the creative process?
Towards the end of the Faith in the Future tour, we started doing a bit of writing in the country in England, two years ago now. And what was really nice about that is I knew that I wasn’t in any rush to make the record. I had the opportunity to be able to make mistakes, and creatively, that’s a really good thing. There were a couple of times where I’d have a week off touring, and I’d go do a bit of writing, because I wanted to scratch that itch. But I also wanted to allow myself time — because in the past, on previous records, I could feel the clock ticking, and that’s not a good feeling.
When you announced the album last year, you said, “I’m still learning and getting better.” Considering how much you’ve already accomplished, is there an innate curiosity that keeps pushing you forward?
Yeah, definitely. And also, the older I get, the more charged-up I am like that. I was told as a young lad that curiosity is like a superpower, and I definitely agree with that. And being a songwriter, or any kind of artist, you don’t get to a master level and then you’ve completed it. There’s always more room to grow.
With this record, I decided to record most of it in Costa Rica, just surrounding myself with how I wanted the record to feel. My [younger self] would think anything like that was just some hippie s–t — “Surely where you write songs isn’t going to really affect the music!” But of course it does. So this record has been about taking risks, really, after feeling like I’ve been in a bit of a pressure cooker until now.
Ahluwalia shirt, jacket and pants; Maison Margiela shoes.
Austin Hargrave
What caused that pressure?
That’s the nature of the industry — it’s a numbers-based industry, and it’s competitive by nature. Coming out of a band the size of One Direction, eyes are on you, and you’re expected to succeed instantly. Those things are normal to feel, but if you let it, it’ll steer you [toward] the wrong decisions. I’ve tried to come at this record with a bit more of a bird’s eye view.
You made a big creative leap from your first album to your second album, and another big leap on this one. Do you feel like you’re getting closer to a signature sound and identity, and what you want to say as a solo artist?
I thought with Faith in the Future that I’d gotten a lot closer to that whole idea — and I definitely showed more identity across that record than Walls. But I realized that I was putting myself in a bit of a box. My voice sounds pretty good on a pop song! So I realized that I’d been spending the longest time looking the opposite way and thinking that was the bravest thing to do — when actually staring pop in the face, and crafting something that I feel really great about, was the smart move.
What has it been like marketing music in the age of TikTok and short-form video? This rollout has been very interactive, including a global scavenger hunt.
I love all the Easter egg stuff, and things that genuinely make it really fun to be a fan — because my biggest fans work really f–king hard. There are probably pros and cons to the new [social media] form. I resisted TikTok for the longest time — it’s like an ever-growing list of requirements as an artist these days, and TikTok just joined that. I thought that it made me cool to not be on TikTok, and I’ve now realized it makes me f–king old. I’m at that age where I still want to come across as a young lad. So TikTok it is! It was something I didn’t really feel comfortable doing at first, but I’m just trying to push the boundaries on this record, even with things like that.
Everyone in music, including artists, is grappling with how to use AI. What’s interesting to me is, when One Direction started out, you guys exploded not only because of the music, but because of your personalities. Is it strange to see the rise of music that has no personality by definition?
I think that there will be a shelf life for that kind of music and those kind of songs. There’s other music that serves a bit of a [different] purpose — if I was one of these streamers playing video games, and I wanted to play music on my stream, licensing is a nightmare with that, so you might just put on an AI playlist there, as just background music. I do think there will be use cases that aren’t really provocative.
It’s been 15 years since One Direction’s X Factor run and the whirlwind that followed. How do you look back on that period — the rocket ship taking off and everything clicking so immediately, which feels increasingly rare these days?
It’s something I’ve definitely been able to appreciate more. I try not to be an arrogant guy, so when I was in the band, I wasn’t too confident talking about how great we were. But now I’m not. I’m more than happy to shout about that.
Those first two years [we] were just holding on for dear life — and not in a bad way, [but] in an utterly exciting way. Things were changing so fast, but you have to remember that none of us have ever had any experience of what it was supposed to be like to be in a boy band, to be a recording artist, to be a touring artist. So when all this stuff started happening for us at a great level, there was part of us that thought, “Well, this is just what really successful artists go through at the start of the process.”
Austin Hargrave
Beginning with 2013’s Midnight Memories, you became more involved in One Direction’s songwriting. Do you still use that foundation today? Or have you changed too drastically from the kid who was co-writing songs back then?
A bit of both, right? The good thing about that experience was that I was absorbing everything that was going on in those rooms, but there’s also a beautiful naivete — you’re not really coming to it with a skill set, you’re just trying to see what happens. Especially as young songwriters, it was really intimidating; [writing] wasn’t something that quote-unquote boy bands ever really got to do. And it wasn’t that we were discouraged from it, but we certainly had to push the authority on that, that we wanted to do that. So there’s definitely been little tricks that I have learned along the way, but there was something beautiful about not really having any context [back then].
How have you decided which songs from the band to perform on your upcoming solo tour? You’ve previously done “Drag Me Down,” “Little Black Dress,” “No Control”…
For starters, I like to pick one that I wrote — but the biggest challenge is finding a lyric that feels all right to sing as a 34-year-old guy. And that’s actually not the easiest thing to do, because some of those One Direction lyrics are f–king raunchy, man, proper! But it’s also a really fun thing to try and integrate something sonically. We do a version of “Night Changes” that’s got some real tempo behind it — Sam Fender was an inspiration for that composition of it. That’s a full-circle feeling of a song that I sang in the band, and now I’ve found a way for it to fit in [my] set.
I put off singing “No Control” forever. There was something kind of beautiful about the fact that everyone was always asking for it, and I never did it. But I did buckle during my Away From Home festival, and actually, I really enjoyed it. I’ve not sang that song for a long time, and that song was a big moment for me in the band, actually. I think I introduced it by saying something along the lines of, “I’m never going to f–king do this again, so enjoy it!” But [the fans] were singing really loud. I instantly felt good about doing it.
What has it been like in the years since One Direction to watch other pop groups take the mantle from you guys?
It’s not something I’ve paid loads of attention to. There was a time when BTS was on the way up, and I felt like, every time I logged into Twitter, they’d just taken one of our records for something — some fastest-selling thing, and they’d take it away! It was just a bit of a shame! But I don’t begrudge them that — that’s the nature of the music industry, it keeps moving.
But I still don’t think there’s been anything similar, really, to One Direction. I’m sure people are trying, but I think what was really interesting about One Direction [was] pretty much every boy band that had come before us would fit into a quite specific mold. There was a way of doing boy bands back in the day — dressing in the same outfits, dancing. We broke free from that mold.
You’ve said that the four surviving members have become closer over the past year — and now, you have a collaborative project with Zayn coming. Do you think that closeness will continue long-term?
I suppose that we’ll see in time. Naturally, there is a closeness — it definitely feels closer than it was. But I think we’re all so busy, it’s hard to keep that consistency. It also depends person to person. Like, Niall — and hopefully he’d say the same about me — we could not exchange a text in a whole year and then go for a beer and literally be chatting nonstop.
What can fans expect from your upcoming tour?
Both the first and second tour were similar — I treated it like a quite moody, rock-n-roll-looking show. Lots of reds and blacks, nothing too colorful, all very low-lit, very quote-unquote “cool.” I love those kind of shows, but this record feels lighter, and more colorful. So I’m interested to see how we match the aesthetic to that.
This album comes out the same month as your son Freddie’s 10th birthday. What has it been like evolving as a person, as a creator and as a father — playing him music, having him grow up and watch you perform?
It’s something I’ve really struggled with, truthfully. When I’m with Freddie, if there was a way to ethically hide that I was a singer and that I was doing all of this, I probably would. You just find yourself having conversations that you probably wouldn’t normally have with a 9- or 10-year-old — there was a point in his life where he started becoming a bit more aware, [when] people would occasionally stop me in the street. Now I’ve got a blanket rule that when I’m with Freddie, I don’t do any pictures or anything, because I don’t get enough time with him as it is, so I cherish those moments.
I’m always really excited to play him my music. He comes to the shows, and that’s a real look behind the curtain for him. Some of the most nervous I’ve been are gigs I’ve done when Freddie is coming. The irony of that is, I could have a botched gig and sing terribly, and he’d still be proud of his dad, I hope. But I really want to be great for him.
