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Zayn Malik Previews New Song 'Befour'

Zayn explains the influence behind his solo album in first solo interview.

Zayn Malik's revival is here.

The former One Direction member previewed his new song "Befour" in a video for Fader magazine on Tuesday (Nov. 17). The low-key bass beat of the song trickles in throughout the artsy clip, which features Zayn -- who's going by only his first name -- in a leather jacket, looking delightfully scruffy as he rides a motorcycle in slow motion and jumps over fences into fields -- you know, rugged stuff.

A lot of his album was recorded in the woods, he explains in a voice over. "We wanted to make it real and genuine," he says.

It's the most we've heard from Zayn than ever before -- usually he's on the red carpet with One Direction before he left in March of this year. This time, it's all him, and I have to admit, it's strange hearing his voice go on and on. He clearly has stuff to say.

"It's a nice feeling to come out of a place where you are being told what to do," he says. "It is just all my perspective and that's fully liberating."

The full interview with Zayn goes up later on Tuesday, but for now, we have this awesome video to rewatch, and the clues that he's giving fans about his new music.

"Life experiences have been the influences for the album, after everything I've been through, especially in the last five years with being in the band an everything. It's quite a personal album," he says. "I used to listen to a lot of Bollywood as a kid. It influenced the music a little bit. Then as I got older, I started listening to my dad's old records, like '90s stuff, like a lot of R&B and a lot of rap."

“I don’t feel like people really know what I’m going to give them, musically,” Zayn says in the interview. “And once they hear it, I feel like they will understand me a little bit more, and they’ll understand why I did what I did, and why I left the band, and why I had to write this sh-t down. Because for five—not even for five years, for ten years, this album has been in my brain, and it’s just been there, sat with me, needing to be out.”

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