The prestige crime drama-inspired music video for Zayn and Sia’s power pop ballad “Dusk Till Dawn” may be mostly predictable and forgettable, but the song’s bridge - when Zayn’s falsetto escalates into the stratosphere as he drags out the line ‘Could give love to your body’ - is memorable enough in itself to leave fans and casual listeners shook. Zayn has always been an emotive and dynamic singer, and Sia’s relatively restrained and somewhat unnecessary presence on the track seems to serve more as an endorsement of his emulation of her tried-and-true hit-making formula.
In his much-hyped FADER cover story (‘Zayn Malik’s Next Direction’) upon leaving the phenomenally successful boy band that made him famous, Mine of Me (2016) producer James "Malay" Ho observed that Zayn was most inspired by Frank Ocean’s oeuvre of avant-garde confessional R&B. Malay noted that Ocean had put in years in the studio, honing his songwriting skills by producing and writing for artists like Justin Bieber, John Legend, Brandy, and Beyoncé. Zayn’s history with One Direction, on the other hand, meant that “His 10,000 hours or whatever have been invested as a performer”.
Zayn’s lack of experience in the songwriting booth is unfortunately still evident. Despite his stated intention of achieving originality with the record (“I still like pop music, but it’s about putting my own spin on it, making it me”), the song does little to innovate on veteran hitmaker Greg Kurstin’s back catalog of hits with Adele and Kelly Clarkson. With only one concession to relying on biography for material (Not tryna be indie/ Not tryna be cool’), the romantic devotional song comes across as being relatively generic, uninspired and non-specific. Mainstream radio will probably fail to escape the song's bulletproof stadium pop production, but Zayn’s experimentation with R&B genre-bending and confessional lyricism is yet to prove that this pop rebel has the cause we all hope he possesses.
