It’s 3 p.m. on a Saturday, and Louis Tomlinson is casually trying to catch cigarettes in his mouth.
He’s standing on a Brooklyn sidewalk, killing time between shots of his Cosmopolitan photo shoot, in front of a friend who’s about six feet away.
On Louis’s cue, Not-Louis throws a cigarette in the general direction of Louis’s open mouth, the way high school boys do with Swedish Fish during lunch. He misses. Not-Louis tries again. Another miss. Then, on the third attempt, Louis finally catches the cig, and he proceeds to light it and then immediately put it out when he’s called back to set.
As the oldest member of the mega-successful group formerly known as One Direction, Louis is about to embark on the solo career his bandmates Zayn Malik and Harry Styles got a two-year head start on. His debut solo album, Walls, is set to come out at the end of this month. The sound is more soulful—less teen heartthrob, more grown-up man who isn’t trying to get every teenage girl in the world to have a crush on him. He even looks more mature, in part because he’s not trying to do the fluffy boy-band hair anymore. Yeah, and he’s never felt more aware of how old he is.
“I’ve never been more conscious of my age, at 27,” he tells me a few hours later while sitting on a couch in a now-empty photo studio, with perfect afternoon selfie light coming through the windows, still obviously nursing a hangover from the night before. “When you’re in your late 20s, you’re in a funny stage of your life—you haven’t been around for ages but you’re also not young, you’re in this weird transitional stage,” he goes on. “That’s been very apparent in my life, and I’m always trying to be as immature as I possibly fucking can now to balance it all out. There’s only so much you can get away with for so long.”
No one would blame Louis for trying to reclaim a little bit of his youth while he still can. In the past four years, he’s faced enough change to turn him from a fresh-faced kid in a boy band to an adult with very real obstacles in his path. In 2016, he lost his mother to cancer. Three years later, his younger sister passed away from an accidental overdose.
In that same stretch of time, he became a father and saw the breakup of One Direction—excuse me, “hiatus,” not breakup. While his former bandmates were able to go on world tours and front fragrance campaigns for Gucci, he had serious reasons for delaying the release of his first album.
His new music reflects the grief of all the above. In the track “Two of Us,” he vulnerably sings: “I know you’ll be looking down, swear I’m gonna make you proud / I’ll be living one life for the two of us.” But there’s still plenty of time spent on the idea of falling in love too. See: “We Made It,” in which he recalls spending weekends at college with his girlfriend when she was in school.
Oh my, I remember those nights
Meet you at your uni, cheap drinks
Drink ’em all night
Staying out till sunrise
Share a single bed and tell each other what we dream about
These lyrics are more personal than the ones you find in the singles he released when he first left the band, before his solo career stalled due to all those personal reasons. Those early songs admittedly slapped but didn’t really feel like him him.
“I was making music to try to chase radio and not really making the right decisions by me in terms of music,” he says.
“I respect the artists that I worked with and I respect the songs, absolutely, but in hindsight, it wasn’t necessarily true to me.”That’s part of why he’s stayed away from collaborations on Walls. He feels like he needs to create an image for himself separate from other people—there are, ahem, four very specific names that come to mind. “I’ve got to stand on my own two feet and say, ‘This is my identity. This is who I am as an artist,’” he says.
That said, the whole promoting-your-album-alone thing isn’t exactly easy—especially when you’re very used to doing this job as part of a unit. The interviews, the photo shoots, the studio sessions, the gigs were all situations he could rely on his bandmates for in the past.
Like, say, if he showed up hungover to something (cough, cough), he could usually depend on Harry, Liam, Niall, or Zayn to be on their game. But now, it’s just him. The one thing that doesn’t feel different, though, are the fans, who have a reputation for being absolute die-hards.
“They’re still as manic and as crazy, in the best possible way,” he says. At a meet and greet recently, he met a girl who told him the first time she listened to a One Direction song, she was 11. Now, she’s 19 or 20, which means Louis has been a part of her life for roughly half of it. “That’s a crazy concept,” he continues. “I left that meet and greet thinking about the fact that she was still a very young girl at 11, and there she was as an adult.”
The fans have grown up, so has he, and so have the other guys he used to make music with. Now that they’re all older and doing their own things, Louis isn’t shy about the fact that they don’t talk all the time. Like any group of friends who come together as 16-year-olds, that relationship is going to look a lot different by the time you’re almost 30.
But it’s not like he has anything bad to say about them. There’s no shade to throw accusing one member of the band of being Ringo Starr, the man who notoriously left The Beatles first. There are no wink-wink comments made about not knowing what to say to any of the other members if they were to run into each other, because their life is shrouded in “mystery” or something. (Although, to be fair, the topic of Zayn was generally avoided.)
“I think all the boys would agree with this. There’s been moments in all our lives where naturally some of us speak to others more than others,” he says. “I wouldn’t say I’m closest to any of the boys. Recently, I’ve probably spoken to Liam 10 times as much as I spoke to the other lads. Six months ago, that was Niall.”
He’s also quick to say he’s not not down for a reunion. If he had to guess, he’d be the one to send the initial, “Alright, boys, let’s do this,” kind of message. When they were in the band, he felt like he was the de facto team captain because he was the oldest.
But if it were to happen, the music would have to be different. The songs were great, but they were definitely reflective of the fact that they were being performed by teenagers, and he’s careful to say that he’d want to pick up specifically where “Made in the A.M.” left off. Take that to mean whatever you want. Cue the conspiracy theories.
As for the timeline of when all this would go down? He’s not sure. Anything past 35 feels too late, but it’s hard to look too far forward when you’re trying to sneak in those last moments of being immature.
“Anything over 30 sounds fucking old to me right now,” he says.
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1st look: On Marlee: Area sweater and pants, Zimmermann heels, Jennifer Fisher earrings; on Louis: Rag & Bone shirt and pants, Nike sneakers. 3rd look: On Marlee: Christian Cowan top and skirt, CosmoStyle Lingerie bra, Aquazzura heels, Tuza earrings, Gelareh Mizrahi bag; on Louis: Versace jacket, shirt, pants, and tie; shot at Fort Defiance in Brooklyn, NY. 4th look: On Louis: Palm Angels shirt, Dondup jeans; on Marlee: La DoubleJ dress, SVNR earrings, Fendi bag. 5th look: On Louis: Stella McCartney jacket and pants, Lacoste hat; on Marlee: Self-Portrait top and pants, Jennifer Fisher earrings, Fendi bag.
Hair: Charles McNair at See Management using R+Co. Groomer: Erica Sauer at The Wall Group using Forest Essentials. Makeup: Katie Jane Hughes. Manicure: Michina Koide at Art Department using Dior Vernis. Model: Marlee Bell/The Lions NY.
