The era of One Direction is well and truly behind us, but that doesn't stop anyone asking questions about the members' boy band past. The one currently fielding questions is Zayn Malik, who left the group in 2015 to pursue a solo career, and just dropped his latest single "Dusk Till Dawn." Does he ever think back to his days in the world's hottest boy band? Does he ever miss working alongside his friends? Well, it's complicated.
"We’re in touch," he said of his relationship with Niall Horan, Harry Styles, Liam Payne, and Louis Tomlinson in an interview with Us Weekly. "Everything is on a civil level. It’s not the way it used to be, obviously, because we were spending 24 hours a day in the band and now we’re growing as individual men, but we still check in."
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As much as that makes sense, it does shatter the illusion we had about the group all being friends. Particularly Malik and Styles.
"To be honest, I never really spoke to Harry even when I was in the band," Zayn revealed. "So I didn’t really expect that much of a relationship with him."
To be fair, neutrality seems to be Zayn's go-to. When asked about Taylor Swift during an interview with The Fader, he was just as reserved.
"When it comes to anything that has to do with trivia about people's personal lives or things that's going on in their careers, I don't necessarily pay too much attention," he prefaced. "I don't pay too much attention to what people even say about me. I just tend to take it for what it is when I meet them people in real life and have a conversation with them. If they're cool with me, then I base my relationship on that...I rate her as an artist, I think she's cool, I think she's successful, and I think she deserves her success because she's worked hard."
But as far as One Direction is concerned, getting a reunion going might take a little bit of work.