Louis Tomlinson Is Sure of His Sound, But Not Much Else, on Album Three

Louis Tomlinson is finally sounding confident. It’s a notable feat for the former One Direction underdog, who has lived in the gargantuan shadow of his culture-shifting band. On his third solo effort, How Did I Get Here?, Tomlinson seems to have found his groove. To echo the album title’s question, how exactly? Well, the musician decamped to the beaches of Costa Rica and came back with a set of sun-tinged pop-rock bops. But is his head in the sand?

Earlier this week, Tomlinson’s confidence veered into the realm of cockiness when he seemed to throw shade at Harry Styles in an X post. “Going to need your help over the next few days to cut through the noise. Time to give this record the moment it deserves,” Tomlinson wrote in a plea to his fans, which just so happened to arrive on the day Styles announced his first new single in four years. Whether he meant to characterize his former bandmate’s fame as so much “noise” or not, it showed just how sure Tomlinson is of his new album, and set a high bar for the project.

Of course, the stakes were already high for How Did I Get Here? After an uneven solo debut with the poorly-timed Walls, which arrived in January 2020, and a middle-of-the-road follow-up in 2022’s Faith in the Future, Tomlinson’s third solo LP marks a pivotal moment: Does he have the self-assurance to be more than just a former member of one of the biggest boy bands of all time and lay the path for his own success?

On How Did I Get Here?, Tomlinson is an eternal optimist as he makes the case for himself. Those past records found the artist toiling through major personal losses, including his mother in 2016 and his sister in 2019. In the middle of Tomlinson’s writing process for this album, Liam Payne died, a tragedy that he has said was “impossibly difficult” for him to process. But Tomlinson is determined to forge ahead on this album, even if that means looking at the world with rose-colored glasses.

The result is music that shows a surprising amount of gumption, if not much else. Across the 12 tracks, Tomlinson swaggers through bass-heavy, funk-inspired pop rock that shimmers and radiates. With the help of producer Nicholas Rebscher, tracks like “Imposter” and “Sanity” will no doubt go off in a live setting. Lyrically, Tomlinson evokes literal images of “Lemonade” and “Sunflowers” to paint the breezy “temporary heaven” he sings about.

Unfortunately, Tomlinson’s commitment to a glass-half-full perspective is exactly what weakens his self-assured songs. For a record that is meant to be Tomlinson’s defining artistic statement, he doesn’t say much. “Is it only human to escape into the delusion?” he sings on the spacey single “Lemonade.” If that’s what he needs to do emotionally, so be it. Unfortunately, escapism can make for less compelling art. Take the aptly-titled “Lazy,” for example, where Tomlinson writes “Maybe it’s the ocean in the air/Maybe it’s just that I don’t really care.” Other tracks, like “Jump the Gun” and “On Fire,” focus on romantic pursuits, making the project feel like an attempt at Top 40 radio fodder in the vein of Ed Sheeran’s late career — hollowed-out music in a popular mold, rather than something only Louis Tomlinson could make.

The most interesting songs on this album, like “Broken Bones” or “Lucid,” hint at a darker complexity behind Tomlinson’s newfound sunny disposition. “Nobody said it’s easy/But I’ve always loved a fight,” he sings over an intriguing mix of synths and charged production on the former track. Meanwhile, “Lucid” finds Tomlinson repeating the question from the album’s title as he tries to assure himself “I’ll be OK/I’ll dream awake.” It’s a refreshing glimpse of honest uncertainty, but the album ends before Tomlinson can explore it any further.