One Direction - is this a legit new threat wrt to a new boy band invasion? y/n

im being a bit reductive for the sake of expediency... the trend i'm talking about is mirroring pop in general (lady gaga "the cure" etc), the current post-tropical house/"future bass" iteration of EDM seen in recent zedd & marshmello songs etc

but as far as the rock end of it goes i think the 1975 -> one direction is far from crazy... 1975 are a niche concern in america but pretty big in the UK & 1D did two blatant rip offs of their sound and i think also messed around with matt healy at one point. and again the guys behind that are working in this same vein w/ some of the listed artists and others. (an interesting tangent here is that "slow hands" -- a bunetta/ryan song that fits comfortably in the company of this realm of tasteful soft rock -- was a bigger hit for niall than anything off harry's album and i think any other solo 1D songs outside of "pillowtalk" and "strip that down"). "wait" doesn't sound precisely like one direction but then again maroon 5 never has sounded like one direction or the other way around. i'm just outlining a continuum.

john mayer produced a song on the shawn mendes album

Daughter is watching iCarly and 1D have just turned up.

Harry's acting skills have certainly improved

maroon 5 are interesting to me specifically... red pill blues is half amazing and i think really representative of this general trend in pop but at the rock end in particular. you can see them slowly un-cheese themselves in the time in between "moves like jagger" (which fwiw was ripping off chic even before "get lucky"... it is maroon 5 after all) and "what lovers do". "don't wanna know" is a straight up trop house song basically & "cold" is the skeletal version of the slow, clean, insanely well produced, rippling guitar line stuff that pops up in a few places on red pill blues ("best 4 u" in particular). V is essentially unlistenable but not that far off of red pill blues really, the latter is just way less... cheesy & corny essentially in a lot of ways (in production and in the way that adam levine's falsetto isn't sharpened into an ice pick). "what lovers do" is basically an attempt at a "cool" version of "moves like jagger" (xtina becomes sza, shellback becomes starrah) but again we're talking about small degrees here -- "sugar" was this plasticine version of disco pop (dr luke & cirkut re-writing katy perry's already infantile but much better "birthday") that feels just a bit more artfully done on "what lovers do"

the 11 min song that closes red pill blues is basically an extended yacht rock jam (maroon 5 balearc remixing themselves) and i really don't think that you have to draw a far line between that and some of the real head-y one direction album tracks like "what a feeling" and "fireproof"

Can’t talk about “what lovers do” w/o genuflecting to “sexual” though.

the 11 min song that closes red pill blues is basically an extended yacht rock jam (maroon 5 balearc remixing themselves) and i really don't think that you have to draw a far line between that and some of the real head-y one direction album tracks like "what a feeling" and "fireproof"

Also I just listened to “Closure” for the first time and it’s a jam.

Oh yeah, Charlie Puth for sure is in that vein. I need to check out the other stuff you all mentioned tho, don't think I've heard any recent Maroon 5 or Shawn Mendes

Think part of what I like about "Stockholm Syndrome" so much is not just the 1975 sounds, but that the song feels so light. The chorus is catchy but not weighed down with a thousand synths like most singles for radio. Just breezes by effortlessly. I know it wasn't a single, so it has a little more freedom in that way, but I think (hope) there is a place for more songs like that on the radio. "No Tears Left to Cry" feels open in the same way

my point wasn't to say that it's absurd to draw any connection between the 1975 and one direction but to say that identifying them specifically as especially significant loci along this 'lineage' which you really have to squint at to notice anyhow is idk a little ridiculous? like phillip phillips's hits, jt's "not a bad thing", several of ed sheeran's singles going back to "the a team", many of the electronic/guitar-hybrid hits like "wake me up" "waves" "stolen dance" "a sky full of stars" and ofc the aforementioned "get lucky", several of the acoustic fauxternative hits like "riptide" and "ho hey" that most people here will turn their noses up at, the list goes on really. 1d certainly fit somewhere in there w/ like "story of my life" and "night changes" and i guess you could say "chocolate" did something as well but to argue one group-via-the-other 'crystallized' this aesthetic that has saturated significant swaths of the airwaves for the past 5+ years is just revisionism in the extreme.

i suppose you could say WELL sure, those are lite guitar pop but they're not all TASTEFUL lite guitar pop so it's different! but that judgment is completely arbitrary and goes back to my original point that we (= cultural commentators/observers/critics/whatever) frequently define a lineage similarly arbitrarily by just picking out the stuff we like and drawing imaginary lines of influence through them when the reality is that plenty of the stuff we want to forget about or dismiss as fluff sounded very much the same and was competing for people's attention (often more successfully!) within the very same spaces

idk maybe i'm just feeling extra cynical about cultural criticism and canonization and such lately and it's manifesting itself as bitter rants on this thread where i refuse to believe that anyone could find maroon 5's recent output to be anything but completely generic and ignorable. ("don't wanna know" apparently being 'trop house' simply reminds me how little that phrase has communicated about any of the music it's been used to describe.)

Matt Healy certainly seems to think it's valid

http://www.mtv.com/news/2737946/matt-healy-one-direction-rip-off-1975/

(like, yes, I also find the canonization among critics of the unctuous dude yacht rock hit axis of pop -- maroon 5, charlie puth, shawn mendes, etc. -- very frustrating, particularly since there are literal hundreds of women in pop/alt-pop making better music. but The 1975 and One Direction have a lot of actual connections, they're not some arbitrary indie band with 100 bandcamp plays.)

s/hit/shit, although unfortunately they are all hits as well

did anyone hear zayn's new album?

lol i was surprised when it seemed like the zayn album came out of nowhere but i guess even the diehards have moved on since it completely flopped - chart peak of 77 in the UK and 61 in the US

yeah, I didn't payed much attention to it.
only listened to it once. i think it's possible for it to have a couple of ok songs, but the album is so so long that i just got tired and gave up.

It's weird, I still love 1D but don't have any interest in their solo material. The closest I come is NIAL, fergodssake

i enjoy niall and harry's solo songs.
saw niall live last year and it was pretty great.

genuinely curious to see what harry does next

i bet i'll like 60 percent of the zayn album but have been too tired to try lol

did anyone hear zayn's new album?

― Nourry, Monday, January 14, 2019 9:29 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No, but I noticed he's currently modelling for Philippine clothing brand Penshoppe ...

this is my sexual "nightmare":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NZvM1918_E

this is his best solo song yet? imo

i think so, too.

this is pretty nice, i really like the balearic vibe, but i wish it was longer

album cover of the year

i support this message.

I don’t understand but I want to

I absolutely adore this single.

the talk about the cover made me listen to it again, and yes

it's very "waves (kacey musgraves remix)"

disappointed to report that the d*plo remix of niall's latest single is a significant improvement upon the original

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVKxjto88Vk

I am embarrassed anew each time I remember when I made this thread, esp now that I'm a fan of their latter albums and some of the solo (Niall and Harry, mostly). Terrible wording in trying to predict whether they'd actually crossover in the States or not.

i'm just going to go out on a limb and predict that many of the ppl expecting a Great Album to precipitate based on "lights up" will be disappointed (except the diehard stans who're gonna love it regardless obv)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-x3uD5z1bQ

i don't have any expectations with harry styles so two pleasant singles so far has been a nice surprise

“sign of the times” - one of the best songs of the decade

i think he was just on snl

hosting and performing

Niall released his second solo album, which I still have to listen, but I'm enjoying this Tears for Fears rip-off, although I prefer when he's doing songs a la fleetwood mac. and he's a cutie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4L3EQ6ljcU

there's some amazing songs on the album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TA-WzcAl5Q

he's had the brilliant idea of continuing to work w/ the ppl who made 1D's best music... genius stuff

some other good ones

new angel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAhdtwJnI8w

small talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fFc0sqAGAc

san francisco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkvm1qEabl4

'cross your mind' is a really good song.
who knew that, besides Harry, Niall would stand out as a solo act?

it was pretty obvious to me tbh

is he singing "It's easy to return the avocado" on "Cross Your Mind"

it was pretty obvious to me tbh

― maura

i thought that zayn's carrer would not be as "invisible" as it seems these days.

great 1D album, although i miss the other voices

"bend the rules" is especially <3

zayn has a new song. it's nice. just nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAo38Q9c4xA