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Niall Horan clings tight to the good times on his new single “End of an Era.” He originally wrote the song with the intention of “looking back on the past with nostalgia, being grateful for what you had and excited for what’s to come,” as he recently told ROLLING STONE – but after the death of his One Direction bandmate Liam Payne, he returned to the piece with a new perspective.
In the first verse, Horan sings: “Time passes so fast that I couldn’t tell you goodbye.” He uses the song to express what he couldn’t say before. “Careless times, yeah, we sure had some / Naive eyes, yeah, we sure looked young / Tears fall down like the future comes / Slowly, and then all at once,” he sings. “Feels like letting go of / Things we’re not supposed to / One breath and it’s over / The end of an era.”
Horan co-wrote “End of an Era” with songwriters John Ryan and Julian Bunetta, who were regular collaborators on One Direction’s last three albums. “John and Julian lived next door to Liam for a long time, and we all grew up together,” Horan said. “It was a really strange experience for the three of us to have to write a song like that because you just don’t expect something like that… A very strange situation for all of us – but something we all had to do for ourselves, for everyone who lost someone, for the fans, for everyone who knew Liam. It felt like the right thing, like something we wanted to do – just awful that we had to do it.”
place on the album
“End of an Era” will appear on Horan’s upcoming album “Dinner Party,” out June 5th. However, the musician wanted to release the song in advance to give it some space. “Some songs take a moment to really say what you want to say. This was one of those songs. I hope it means as much to you as it does to me,” Horan wrote on social media ahead of the release. “I thought he needed his own space before the album came out in a few weeks – so there you go.”
Fans might be surprised by the song’s celebratory tone given the context in which it was created. Payne died in October 2024 at the age of 31 after falling from his hotel balcony. One Direction fans mourned the loss, as did the late singer’s companions in the industry. For Horan, looking back on their years as a band and reflecting on them made them feel how good they had had it. “At the end of the day, all of my memories are happy ones,” he told Rolling Stone. “We talked about it when we wrote the song. All of our memories are about traveling, messing around, having fun and being teenagers. I don’t have any negative memories.”
Horan added, “It felt liberating to write about it. I think you can hear that in the song. The first verse is pretty sad, but then it’s like, ‘Remember all the good times we had.’ It has a bit of both. I love how it starts out as one kind of song and then turns into a completely different one. It reminds me a bit of the 1D stuff too.”
More new singles
“End of an Era” follows the releases of “Dinner Party” and “Little More Time.”
