Photo Credit: Christian Tierney

One Direction’s ‘nice guy’ Niall Horan has failed to have the big stand-out moment since the beloved boy band’s dissolution in 2016 that Harry Styles and, briefly, Zayn Malik enjoyed. If Horan’s newest album, The Show, is any indication, the 29-year-old seems to have made peace with this reality. A collection of breezy, sun-kissed, pop numbers that simmer but never boil, these are songs meant to backdrop Summer days and evenings. 

The Show opens with one of the LP’s most enjoyable songs, “Heaven,” which splits the difference between tasteful surf-rock and radio-friendly pop-rock. It’s a plea for simple pleasures (“Let’s not get complicated”) that proves to be one of Summer’s more enjoyable little pop songs. Another highlight is “Save My Life” – a peppy and charming pop song that injects a refreshing sense of melodrama into the subject matter, with Horan hinging everything on his current relationship (“I’m starting to feel like // You might save my life”). A horns section livens up the music significantly in the song’s final third.

The Show’s best moments occur when Horan achieves this delicate balance between minimalist acoustics and melodic, hook-heavy pop music. When the album leans too heavily into one of these directions at the expense of the other, the music suffers. “If You Leave Me” is polished to the point of sounding sterile – its message of dependence (“If you leave me // Oh, I think that I just might lose it completely”) is undermined by the flaccidity of the sound. Alternatively, “You Could Start a Cult” – which is far less interesting than its title suggests – falters because of how sparse the production is, with Horan’s words backed up little more than barely-there finger-picked guitar playing. Such a minimalist song can work if its message is genuinely compelling (see: Ruston Kelly’s recent release “Mending Song” as an example of this), but instead, Horan only delivers a series of confused and unaffecting similes and metaphors about love and communication.

The Show was produced primarily with producer-to-the-stars Joel Little. Little has previously produced some of the last decade’s most compelling pop music (namely, Lorde’s “Royals”, “Team” and “Ribs,” but also Broods’ sorely underrated “Life After”). But he’s also reduced the music of subversive and multidimensional stars into tired, overused sonic palettes – responsible for some of the most hamfisted numbers from Taylor Swift’s Lover (“You Need To Calm Down,” “ME!”) as well as some of the unusually colorless music from Marina’s Love + Fear album. The music of The Show, suggests a producer uninterested in pushing Horan past his well-established comfort zone. 

Any release from a former One Direction member in 2023 is bound to draw comparisons to the recent output of Harry Styles, given the astronomical success the “Watermelon Sugar” star has enjoyed. However, Horan makes it particularly hard to avoid such comparisons here. The fast-paced synths and drum machine loops of “Meltdown” suffer an uncanny resemblance to “As It Was.” But whereas Styles effectively captured the frantic anxiety of watching a relationship slowly dissolve away from its peak, Horan never manages to transcend a sea of platitudes, like “This too shall pass.” The glacial, orchestral title track, meanwhile, resembles the first half of Styles’ breakout solo hit “Sign of The Times,” but is absent of the cathartic build and release that made Styles’ song a hit. Moments like this, which are derivative and banal, ultimately form the majority of The Show’s 10-track list. Despite a handful of highlights, this is an album that rarely transcends being background music. While Harry Styles may be making music for a sushi restaurant, Horan, it seems, is making music for retail and supermarket speakers. 

Written by: Tom Williams