One Direction’s Irish bard has always been the soul of warmth and charm, always ready to bust out his acoustic guitar and make a stadium feel like a rowdy pub. But Niall Horan elevates his game with The Show, his third and finest album yet. The last time he dropped an album, Heartbreak Weather, it was just in time to see the world shut down for the pandemic. His big solo tour was over before it began. For an artist who clearly lives for the onstage experience, it must have been sheer torment to have his songs go unsung for so long. So Niall had to turn elsewhere for inspiration: inside. 

He gets emotional on The Show, as he heads into his thirties. He wrote many of these tunes on piano, since his beloved guitars were stuck in tour storage—an especially cruel fate for this guy. It’s full of laid-back Laurel Canyon-inspired ballads, heavy on the mellow, full of feelings about looking for sanity in a time of personal turmoil. As he confesses in “Must Be Love,” “I’m a specialist at overthinking everything.”

For the most jovial bro in One Direction, the one with the widest smile and the biggest warm-hearted enthusiasm for the band, it’s touching to hear him get so intimate on his own. He collaborates with producers John Ryan and Joel Little, as well as ace co-writers like Tobias Jesso Jr and Amy Allen, both fresh from working with his old mate Harry Styles on Harry’s House. “Meltdown” is the most winning moment, an Eighties new wave trip with Strokes-style drums and early Depeche Mode synths, as Niall promises, “When it all comes down I’ll be there.” He talks a friend down from a paranoid crisis (“One broken glass turns to total collapse / Just know this too shall pass”), dueting with himself via vocoder. 

He brings empathy to power ballads like “Heaven,” addressing twenty-something turmoil. “Science” reaches out to someone struggling with depression (“Are you numb? Can you touch? Is the silence a little too much?”), letting them know they’re not alone. But the emotional highlight is the wonderfully titled love song “You Could Start a Cult,” stripped down to just Niall and his acoustic guitar, as he vows, “I will follow you till there’s no tomorrow.” On The Show, it sounds like Niall Horan knows exactly where he’s going.

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