While Malik mostly avoids addressing his days in 1D, this is actually the second time he’s revisited the band’s catalog on social media in the last three months.
ZAYN appears to be getting a little nostalgic, posting a 30-second black-and-white video of himself singing One Direction‘s 2014 single “Night Changes” on Monday night (Aug. 15) to Instagram.
The ballad was released as the second single from the group’s fourth studio album Four in November 2014 — just four months ahead of Zayn Malik’s surprise departure from the boy band in March 2015. It peaked at No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was a top 20 hit on the Pop Airplay chart. Malik is a co-writer on the song alongside all his 1D bandmates, as well as Jamie Scott, Julian Bunetta and John Ryan.
In the new video, Malik sings the second half of the chorus — originally recorded by bandmate Harry Styles — crooning, “Everything that you’ve ever dreamed of/ Disappearing when you wake up/ But there’s nothing to be afraid of/ Even when the night changes/ It will never change me and you.”
While Malik mostly avoids addressing his days in 1D, this is actually the second time he’s revisited the band’s catalog on social media in the last three months. Back in June, he posted a video of himself hitting the high notes from “You & I,” the fourth and final single from One Direction’s 2013 album Midnight Memories, with eagle-eyed fans noticing that former bandmate Louis Tomlinson liked the clip on Instagram.
Directioners are losing it over ZAYN’s 1D callbacks, with one Twitter user commenting: “ZAYN SINGING ONE DIRECTION TWICE IN THE GOOD LORDS YEAR OF 2022 ??!!!?!!!?” and another writing, “WE DON’T NEED THERAPY, WE JUST NEED ZAYN MALIK SINGING NIGHT CHANGES.”
This feel-good news is a change of pace from the bleak headlines last year about Malik pleading no contest to four charges of harassment against his ex Gigi Hadid — with whom he shares daughter Khai — and Gigi’s mother, Yolanda Hadid, in the wake of a Sept. 29, 2021, argument in which the singer is alleged to have grabbed and shoved the elder Hadid. In a statement posted to Twitter at the time, Malik described the incident as a “private matter” and said that “despite my efforts to restore us to a peaceful family environment that will allow for me to co-parent my daughter in a manner in which she deserves, this has been ‘leaked’ to the press.”
Watch Malik’s 1D throwback and see Directioners’ breathless reactions below:
