The eventful few years separating Louis Tomlinson from 2022’s Faith in the Future and his third solo album more than justify the question he poses in the title How Did I Get Here?—a line taken from dreamy, soft-rock closing track “Lucid,” which narrates Tomlinson’s tenuously trippy connection to reality. “It’s a statement,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I’m not interested in answering the question. The first couple of years, once I’d been doing this job, I think I was probably a bit more interested in answering that question, but after years and years of trying, there is no answer. I think it’s so out of the ordinary what I do. So I’m just looking around, open arms, like, ‘How the fuck did I get here? How did we get here?’ Me and my fans, you know? It’s basically gratitude, I suppose. That’s the feeling that I was thinking about.” Front-loaded with sugary, summery, lovestruck pop rock before opening the gate to a more insular excavation of Tomlinson’s darker mental recesses via the jagged chords and distortion of “Broken Bones,” the record is a game of two clear halves. “The intention with this record was to be a better reflection of my personality because parts of those first two records [2020’s Walls and 2022’s Faith in the Future], they’re quite gloomy,” he says. “It’s quite dark. It’s quite emotionally heavy. It’s not really how I live my life. I’ve had some tough things to deal with, but I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy and there’s always some kind of positive punchline, even in the darkest time. I feel like I’d got the emotional weight on the previous records, but not quite found the light at the end of the tunnel. And that’s what this record really was about because I feel really, really good in myself, personally, professionally.” Co-written with a clutch of old faithful collaborators including Jamie Scott (Tom Grennan), David Sneddon (Rag’n’Bone Man), and Hurts singer Theo Hutchcraft, the album kicks off with a rush of new-relationship energy. Sun-drenched tracks like “Lemonade” and “Lazy” add funky new shades to Tomlinson’s sonic palette, while “Last Night” builds a rush of apocalyptic euphoria onto skittering drum ’n’ bass production. Later, dramatic synth stabs punch up the “proper paranoia” of “Imposter,” in contrast to the slow, stripped-back climb to crescendo on “Dark to Light,” a poignant rendering of grief’s unanswered questions. And though “Jump the Gun” retains some of the Britpop-inspired swagger that has been foundational to Tomlinson’s identity post-One Direction, the bombastic pop energy that permeates much of How Did I Get Here? reflects a distinct—and welcomed—shift in his artistic approach. “I have only ever really painted with two or three different colors,” he says. “Let’s see what happens if I have the full color palette. It’s cliché, right: You leave a pop band and you try and be as alternative as you possibly can. I had such a mission of proving who I was. All the while, denying how I got where I got. The idea of something really centrally pop was terrifying to me. When you’ve come from a band like One Direction, you don’t want to get put back in that box. I’m immensely proud of One Direction, it goes without saying, but it was very pop, the first three records in particular. This record was about being brave and leaning into those things that in the past I might have felt, ‘Is that cool enough? Does that say enough about me as an artist?’”