Louis Tomlinson's 'We Made It' Goes Deeper Than Just 'The Same Four Chords'

Louis Tomlinson isn't Charlie Puth. That much should be clear to anyone who's ever heard their respective musical outputs — Puth's a silken crooner, while Tomlinson's earthy tenor elevated and energized the all-out rock numbers in One Direction's catalog. Nevertheless that distinction wasn't necessarily clear to the American producers and songwriters he worked with immediately after his musical group went on hiatus in 2016. Right after a while, Tomlinson mentioned he grew tired of these nudging him toward a more R&B/pop-influenced sound as he started his own solo journey.


Although he still gave it a try. He teamed up with Bebe Rexha and Steve Aoki for a pair of electronic-pop hits rooted in more contemporary trends. Then Tomlinson went quiet for a little, popping back up earlier this year to share an epiphany. "I'm not here to compete with the likes of Drake and Ariana Grande," he wrote in a note shared on social media. "I'm here to prepare music I love and make my fans delighted to mention they are a fan."


This is the same artist who grew up loving Amy Winehouse and Arctic Monkeys on the radio, so it fits that his newest music sounds like an assortment of polished guitars, big drums, and massive choruses that simply swallow you whole. "Guitar music is massive in the North of England," Tomlinson recently told MTV News, "so I think I'm routinely just attempting to sort of find a middle ground between where I've come from and what I know the fans really wish to hear."


On new single "We Made It," which dropped Thursday (October 24), Tomlinson even makes a point to create the distinction explicit: "Singing something poppy on the same four chords / Used to worry 'bout it, right now I don't no more." In other words, this is who Louis Tomlinson is — right after several years of soul searching and weathering personal tragedy — and this is him giving it to you on his own terms. "I was sort of making music for other people and sort of relying also much on other people's advice he mentioned. "So I was sort of attempting to resemble that in that verse."


"We Made It" is the third taste of Tomlinson's upcoming debut studio album, Walls, due out January 31, 2020. He led off this year with "Two of Us," a heartrending ode to his late mother, and followed it up in September with the Britpop-channeling "Kill My Mind." In that video, Tomlinson fronts a musical group onstage at a club, bathed in crimson light — a genuine rock-star (re)arrival. The song's distorted guitars and surging pop-rock sound noticed Tomlinson closer to childhood radio favorites in Oasis than on anything since "No Control," a beloved One Direction cut he co-wrote and sings lead on. "I tell you what: I'm forever getting pressure online to perform 'No Control' As soon as I come around to doing my tour," he mentioned, "so I probably will put it in the setlist."


He should. His "Kill My Mind" musical group setup wasn't just a construct for the video; Tomlinson's got a crowd of musicians backing him up to prepare every TV efficiency and venue gig as live an experience as possible, something he mentioned is critical to him. As he revealed this week, he's got a 43-date world tour ahead of him in 2020, the opening time he's ever hit the road as a solo artist.


It makes sense that he'd hope to be backed up by a live band: This is a guy who spent the earliest piece of our phone call praising "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor." ("Every time I hear it, it makes me feel good. I fucking love that song.") He also shouted out Sam Fender, Gerry Cinnamon, DMA's, and Catfish and the Bottlemen, despite their testy history with Tomlinson's previous musical group. "Absolutely love them, which is quite ironic because they did once chat some shit about One Direction," he mentioned. "So I went off them for about 18 months, and then they came out with a new album, which was sick."


Tomlinson's not a rock god in the "We Made It" clip. In his words, it's a "more cinematic" video than "Kill My Mind" and acts as a continuation of the loose story introduced in the latter. He's not the protagonist, a fact he usually revel in, and acts more as as a Greek chorus haunting the fringes of a doomed love story. Tomlinson filmed it with director Charlie Lightening at a English language seaside arcade and boardwalk. By the end, there's another tease: although more to the star-crossed twin leads' love tale, to be told in Tomlinson's next video.


Though he's not the focal point of the visual, "We Made It" finds Tomlinson singing some of his most personalized lyrics however. Here, he digs into his perceptions of his own past a little removed from the opening whirlwind. It's hard to hear the line "don't know why they put all of this on us while we're so young" as anything although a direct nod to his six years spent in the largest boy musical group of the 2010s, a time he's since been open about. Any time we were attempting to write for One Direction, we were attempting to write things that relate more to four or five guys in the musical group, so of course [the songs are] a little bit more general and little bit much less specific," he mentioned. It's easy to feel, mention, the lovelorn haze in "Fireproof" because of how widescreen the lyrics go.


Nevertheless writing a Louis Tomlinson solo song? Where every note and word will be attached to only one voice, one face, and one name? "I'm much more of a perfectionist," he admits. On these early singles, ahead of the forthcoming full story on Walls, we've finally gotten listen to what that sounds like.