Niall Horan pays tribute to late bandmate Liam Payne with a song on his new album
Liam Payne’s untimely death in October 2024 sent shockwaves through the fanbase of one the biggest boy bands in history. For fellow One Direction member Niall Horan, the loss was particularly painful and personal.
Horan remembers his friend in the song ‘End of an Era’, a wistful lullaby part of his upcoming album Dinner Party.
Speaking to GQ Hype, the singer said he met Payne in Buenos Aires in early October, when he was in town for a show. The two had actually coordinated so their trips lined up.
While Horan performed his Oct 2 show and left the city, Payne was stuck in Argentina after the visa renewal he was seeking got delayed. Two weeks later, on Oct 14, Payne fell to his death from his hotel room balcony.
Horan recalled getting the news of the death while watching TV at home. “And I was just like, what?… I just didn’t think it was real. Someone so young, you’re not expecting to hear that they’ve passed, especially someone that you’ve just seen. I just went back from shock to sadness to anger.”
As fans flooded the internet with nostalgia-inducing clips of the band members in their youth, Horan found himself seeing “lots of photos and videos and things of us growing up together. And being nostalgic about it straight away, along with fear and sadness and all the stuff that comes with grief.”
Mourning the loss, he said, was an ongoing process that involved “going into hiding” after the funeral and writing ‘End of an Era’ to get his feelings out there into the world.
Julian Bunetta, a longtime One Direction collaborator who worked on the song, said, “We rewrote it two, three times maybe, just trying to just get the essence of the feeling. We just kept working on it until we felt it was right. And I love it. It could be easy to not write about it because it’s a hard subject. It’s a hard thing to do. So I’m proud of him for doing it.”
Other songs on Dinner Party — an album named in honour of the party where Horan met his girlfriend Amelia Woolley — are also inspired by his experiences in life, moving into his 30s.
The first track, ‘Dinner Party’ released on Saturday, with the rest expected to be out on June 5. The album is Horan’s fourth from his solo career after the 2016 dissolution of the band that had shot him, Payne, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik to teenage stardom.
