Niall Horan will be paying tribute to his former bandmate Liam Payne on his new album, Dinner Party.
Horan, 32, opened up about his upcoming music in a GQ Hype interview published on Thursday, March 19, and revealed that one of his new songs, “End of an Era,” is about Payne, who died in October 2024 at age 31.
“We had it / Pure magic / Remember what it was like / Time passes / So fast and / I couldn’t tell you goodbye,” Horan sings in the track, per the outlet. He cowrote it with Julian Bunetta and John Ryan, both of whom met Horan and Payne when they were still teenagers.
Following Payne’s death, Horan said he “went into hiding a little bit” to grieve Payne, who died suddenly after falling from a hotel balcony in Argentina. As fans shared their memories of Payne online, Horan remembered seeing “lots of photos and videos and things of us growing up together. And being nostalgic about it straightaway, along with fear and sadness and all the stuff that comes with grief.”
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Asked to share what he remembers most about Payne, Horan said he treasures the memory of sharing a room with him during the boot camp portion of The X Factor (when Simon Cowell famously put Payne and Horan together with Harry Styles, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson to form One Direction).
“I just got to know him a little bit and then we ended up doing what we did together,” Horan recalled. “Memories that only he and I can share ’cause you have a team and you have people around all the time, but we always said that only us have that experience, no one else has that.”
Horan also opened up about seeing Payne shortly before his death. The pair met up in Buenos Aires while Horan was in Argentina on tour.
“It was great,” he recalled. “[Payne] seemed in good form and we had a good laugh, good reminisce. … I heard Louis talking about this recently, it’s so true. It’s like you haven’t seen each other in ages and then you just fall back in like it was 10 years ago.”
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Bunetta, 43, said that he, Horan and Ryan rewrote “End of an Era” two or three times before settling on what became the final track on Dinner Party.
“We just kept working on it until we felt it was right,” he explained. “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.”
Horan, for his part, said that Payne’s death inspired him to do some self-reflection that brought new layers of meaning to his music.
“Something happens in your early 30s and you’re like, yeah, maybe subconsciously, you’re changing,” he told the outlet. “Some of the songs are now deeper to me now that I think of it, really ’cause I’ve subconsciously been writing deeper lyrics.”
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Horan is the latest former One Direction member to release new music this year. Tomlinson, 34, kicked off 2026 with his third album, How Did I Get Here?, while Styles, 32, dropped his fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., on March 6. Malik, 33, is set to release his fifth album, Konnakol, on April 17, with Horan’s Dinner Party following on June 5.
During an interview earlier this month, Styles admitted that he has found it difficult to talk about Payne’s death.
“I think there was a period when he passed away where I really struggled with kind of, like, acknowledging how strange it is to have people kind of, like, own part of your grief in a way,” the Grammy winner told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I have such strong feelings around my friend passing away. Then suddenly being, you know, like, aware of there’s maybe a desire from other people [for] you to convey that in some way, or it means you’re not feeling what you’re feeling or something.”
