Hear Me Out: “iT’s YoU” by Zayn Malik

As a solo artist, Zayn Malik is purportedly striving to make the music he could not with One Direction. “iT’s YoU,” the creatively capitalized track from his upcoming album, “Mind of Mine,” is one such example: This hazy, beautifully spare torch-song-cum-slow-jam would not have worked half so well with another four boys’ voices piled on. Whether “iT’s YoU” quite succeeds as proof of Zayn’s new persona, or even just as a song, is a separate question.

It’s mostly deftly composed, built around a stunning, flickering synth and a deep heartbeat thump of a drum. (The less that is said about the bridge—which, in featuring sugary strings and other such ooey orchestral flourishes, sounds as if it were beamed in from another sonic universe entirely—the better.) Over this generally sound construction, Zayn unleashes perhaps his most stunning vocal performance to date, especially in the chorus, where he weightlessly floats up into the upper reaches of his range, singing the song’s title phrase in a woozy, androgynous, near-angelic falsetto. He has a lovely run up there, drifting impossibly high and then higher still, fitting in a good several vocal climaxes, before finally he reluctantly descends.

The chorus is so ravishingly perfect that it is good thing that the song seems to be almost all chorus. The rest of the track doesn’t hold up quite so well, largely due to the subpar lyrics, which alternate between boilerplate pseudo-diaristic mush and real meanness. The latter is another difference from his 1D days: At last, Zayn gets to have some bite, and he goes at it perhaps too keenly, opening the track with an almost vicious verse about an ex before turning his sights on his current paramour, whom he also paints—if in a more lovelorn fashion—as a woman who has done him wrong. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Writing a catty song about one’s ex is practically a solo pop singer’s birthright, and wounded, pretty, and mean is a look Zayn wears well.

“Mind of Mine” out 3/25 on RCA Records.

—Staff writer Amy J. Cohn can be reached at amy.cohn@thecrimson.com.