It would appear that at some point towards the end of their career as the World’s Biggest Boyband, One Direction were quietly ushered into a room and told they had to face the future. A hat of some description was solemnly produced and the band members told to draw lots from it, in order to see which one would pursue which standard post-boyband solo career. Zayn Malik got “attempt to reinvent yourself as a credible R&B artist”. Cheeky Harry Styles pulled out “vaguely alternative rock” – a tough gig that led to him releasing an album that, depending on your perspective, either demonstrated his deep knowledge of classic rock, or sounded like a bizarre one-man episode of Stars in Their Eyes, with Styles variously impersonating the Rolling Stones, Elton John, U2 and David Bowie. Still, better luck than Louis Tomlinson, who got “pop-dance collaborations with EDM producers” and Liam Payne, stuck with “be a bit like Justin Timberlake or something”.

Niall Horan’s piece of paper, meanwhile, seems to have simply read “Radio 2”. His debut solo album corrals an array of talent, including Adele co-writer Tobias Jesso Jr, Kings of Leon producer Jacquire King and Jamie Scott, who helped write a string of One Direction’s hits. You get the feeling they may have been set to work with a copy of Britain’s most popular radio station’s playlist and instructions to cover as many of the bases found on it as possible.

Flicker’s main currency is post-Ed Sheeran acoustic balladry, of varying degrees of quality. Single This Town is both a fair forgery of Sheeran’s style and a good song in its own right, blessed with a nagging earworm of a hook. So nagging, in fact, that Horan and his team apparently couldn’t get it out of their heads during the album’s writing sessions: both the title track and Paper Houses sound remarkably similar.

Elsewhere, we find stuff that sounds like yacht rock, over which the influence of Fleetwood Mac hangs heavy. Not least On the Loose – very much the song of your dreams if you thought that Haim’s homages to Buckingham and Nicks were too terrifyingly avant-garde for their own good – and Since We’re Alone, a song which, were it any more imbued with the spirit of Rumours, would develop a crippling cocaine habit and start inadvisably sleeping with its bandmates. And there’s country, of the contemporary mainstream Nashville variety, which essentially sounds like pop-AOR with a chewy accent and pedal steel guitar: Seeing Blind is a duet with Maren Morris, 2016’s Country Music Association new artist of the year, and the author of US million-seller My Church.



None of it is terribly exciting, but in fairness, setting the listener’s pulse racing with the head-spinning shock of the new clearly wasn’t the intention here. And it would be churlish to argue that swaths of it are anything other than well-crafted – you can easily imagine virtually all of it ending up exactly where it wants to be, punctuating rounds of Ken Bruce’s PopMaster and cropping up between the dedications on Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs. It comes with lyrics that cannily position Horan as the cuddly, down-home One Directioner, in marked contrast to the stoned, libidinous mood of Zayn Malik’s Mind of Mine or Harry Styles’ album, on which he seemed to be perpetually waking up hungover in a hotel room, struggling to recall the name of last night’s conquest. Horan gives that kind of thing a go on On the Loose, but it’s not hugely convincing. Instead, he spends most of Flicker singing lyrics you might describe as awwww-inspiring: pining for the simple charms of girls from back home, out of whose orbit he was cruelly lifted by fame.

Perhaps that’s not the only thing that’s canny about Flicker. The middle of the road might not be the most thrilling destination for the former boyband member, but it’s a far safer bet commercially than trying to convince sceptical rock or R&B fans that you’re cut from the same cloth as the artists they love. It clearly isn’t going to inspire the hyperventilating profiles in Rolling Stone that Harry Styles’ eponymous debut did, nor the kind of hip fashion mag approval afforded to Zayn Malik’s stylistic transformation. But last month Horan’s single Slow Hands topped the US Top 40 radio chart, and Flicker might hang around longer than either of his bandmates’ efforts did. Its lack of artistic ambition or character of its own is easy to mock, but Horan may well have the last laugh.