Superstar idol, indie acolyte, festival boss - Louis Tomlinson has been a lot of things over the course of his time in the spotlight, but as he releases his second solo album ‘Faith In The Future’, he’s set to surprise the world all over again.

Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.
Photo Assistant: Natalie Lloyd-Shaw.
Styling: Helen Seamons.
Styling Assistant: Will Moore.
Grooming: Krystle G.

"TikTok is probably telling the kids what to drink these days. I just still drink me vodka Red Bull, you know what I mean?" For an artist who found fame as part of one of the biggest boy bands of all time, Louis Tomlinson is remarkably down to earth.

Sipping on a Stella, he sits down with Dork on one of RMT's August strike days – which he's 100% here for, btw. We're pulling a lot of strings for this. Frantically organising our shoot and interview in the space of about 48 hours, Louis takes it all in his stride, plopping down in the evening for a supremely relaxed chat after a cig and a beer.

He's about four shows off finishing his first solo world tour (another sell-out under his belt), which actually began in 2020. Managing to squeeze in a couple of dates before the pandemic hit, it was the energy of those initial gigs that sparked the inspiration for his forthcoming second album 'Faith In The Future', arriving in November.

For the first five years of his career, the cycle of touring and recording and touring and recording was all Louis knew. Then being the last of his ex-bandmates to release a solo album, taking his time creating music to actually hit the road with, meant he was a decade into being a musician before he toured alone.

"It was a long, long time for me to wonder what it might be like," he says. "And also, there was a fear in the back of my mind that, because I've experienced touring at such a high level with the band, in amazing, massive fucking venues, I didn't really know what my tour was going to look like or feel like or even sound like in terms of energy in the room and fans singing back."

He needn't have worried. Never disappointing, his Louies showed up in their droves. "It's blown all my expectations. I've felt fucking blessed this whole tour, like every place I've gone, and I'm not just being dramatic; it's been fucking amazing everywhere." A proper World Tour, he's played to more than 500,000 people across 80 shows over the last year. Getting back on the horse and smashing arenas quickly became his life again.

"That obviously gives me a lot of pride, especially going places like Australia. It's a long fucking way from Donny, you know?" he laughs. "So to play sold-out shows over there, it's fucking mind-blowing, really. Every single night, it doesn't really matter how my day's going; after the first song, I just get slapped in the face with the energy of the crowd and the adrenaline that then feeds me."

It's a tale as old as time at this point, provided your calendar only starts in early 2020. Artist plans a tour, pandemic hits, doesn't happen. Except Louis found himself in limbo. Caught between feeling the highs of his first solo shows at the start of the year, then crashing into the isolation of what followed, he wrote 'Faith In The Future' imagining what the tour would be like when it went ahead. The process saw him moving away from the intimacy and emotional weight of 'Walls' and creating something more uplifting.

"Originally, in my master plan that I had in my head, I was going to go on a year's worth of touring," he explains. "That was going to feed me full of experience that I could then go on to write about. It didn't. I almost ended up in kind of a middle ground where I was lucky enough to get a taste of what the shows would feel like, so that was part experience and part imagination going into this next record."

When reflecting on his debut, he found that there weren't enough uptempo numbers for a live show. 'Walls' was Louis telling his story so far - effectively twelve ballads detailing the love and loss that was recent memory at the time. That's not to say he isn't proud of his debut. It was a necessary step in his career that cemented the vision he had for his own sound after spending years finding his feet in the public eye post-One-Direction.

But with the heavy stuff out of the way ("I don't like people feeling sorry for me. That's not the way I carry myself in life in general," he says of his first album), Louis landed on the phrase 'Faith In The Future' in early 2021, setting about making a record based on hope, and more importantly, bangers.

"I had the title for the album before I'd written any songs for this record. I was 99% sure I wanted to call the album 'Faith In The Future', then COVID happened, and that was, like, weirdly appropriate. I feel like people needed that kind of hopeful sentiment."

He tweeted out the phrase and found legions of fans naturally gravitating towards it, which sealed the deal. Fast forward to September 2022, and he was putting it out online again. This time, it was in tandem with an album announcement and introductory single 'Bigger Than Me', which takes the balladry of 'Walls', puts a positive spin on it, and blows it up big enough to match the arenas he's filling.

"That was definitely the first moment where I had a song that I felt represented the ambition and the statement of intent," he says of the track. "It's got one of those big choruses, and I think my vocal shines off it. Out of everything on the album, it was pretty clear what the first thing was going to be. I think I would have struggled to pick another first track. It just felt so appropriate."

He notes that writing 'Bigger Than Me' gave him more confidence in writing the rest of the record, and doing it in a way that finally felt like he was making something that aligned with his personal tastes. At the very beginning of his solo venture, he'd played with dance-pop on collaborations with Steve Aoki ('Just Hold On'), and Bebe Rexha and Digital Farm Animals ('Back To You'). Then he'd sacked it off and run in the other direction on 'Walls', choosing a sound indebted to the early 2000s indie rock he grew up on. 'Faith In The Future' is where he finds a happy medium, spurred on by an interest in Stuart Price's work on Australian trio DMA'S last record, 'The Glow'.

"With the first album, I was so particular about every specific sound, especially what I didn't like. So, for example, because I'd done the song with Steve Aoki - which, again, was a great launch to my career, but musically never felt that true to me - I was like, well, I'm just going to kind of deviate from those sounds and go all-in on the guitars with as much authenticity, musically, as possible. It wasn't until I heard the latest DMA'S album where they managed to use all these really interesting dance sounds, but in a very authentic, unique way. I think it gave me food for thought going into this album."

Remaining authentic has clearly been a huge part of this process for Louis. Tracks like opener 'The Greatest' and 'Bigger Than Me' are expansive and wide open, while 'Written All Over Your Face' melodically pulls from indie floor fillers akin to early Arctic Monkeys singles. Then he dials it right back to the conversational intimacy of 'That's The Way Love Goes' on the closer. 

Seeming slightly disgruntled with previous writing sessions, he set out to work with more artists who aligned with his current philosophy on songwriting. Those being Hurts' frontman Theo Hutchcraft, Courteeners' bassist Joe Cross, indie-pop songwriter Nico Rebscher (who gets a special shoutout for being a "good boozer"), and The 1975 and Wolf Alice producer Mike Crossey. He wanted to keep the writing team smaller this time around because he'd worked with "about a hundred different fucking people" on 'Walls', making it harder to maintain the sonic continuity he's achieved on 'Faith In The Future'.

"What's been slightly different about the writing process this time is that I tried to work with less professional songwriters and more artists, because there's a different level of care and love for the music you're doing. And that's not undermining any other session I've been in. It's just sometimes when you go into these sessions with certain professional songwriters, it can feel a bit like a job, rather than a passion project."