No group becomes a global sensation without springing the odd surprise.
And, having already shifted the art of the boy band away from blazers, soppy ballads and choreographed dance routines, One Direction continue to confound expectations on their third album since forming on The X Factor in 2010.
Bristling with youthful bravado, this is the sound of five young men at the top of their game. If their debut album, Up All Night, was an exercise in tuneful, generic pop and its follow-up, Take Me Home, a more forceful endeavour with rockier moves, then Midnight Memories packs an even heftier punch.
For starters, the former talent show wannabes are more involved in the writing, albeit with plenty of help from old hands such as McFly, Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody and US writer-producer Ryan Tedder, who wrote Bleeding Love.
They have also edged closer in places to out-and-out rock. Loud guitars and anthemic choruses abound, though little attempt is made to hide some of the musical reference points.
Just as last year’s Live While We’re Young sounded like a watered down version of the Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go, so Best Song Ever echoes the synth-driven opening to the Who’s Baba O’Riley, while the bouncy Diana strays uncomfortably close to The Police’s Don’t Stand So Close to Me. The title track has Radio Ga Ga-style handclaps, and Little Black Dress could have been lifted straight from the Darkness album Permission to Land.
Lyrically, there are salutes a-plenty to the band’s all-action, high-octane life on the road, and the hysteria they are capable of inducing among their fans.
Given the youth of the loyal Directioners, any sexual references are restricted to sly innuendo, with heart-throb Harry Styles hinting at his involvement in a love triangle on the folk-flavoured Happily: “It’s 4am and I know you’re with him / I wonder if he knows I touched your skin / And if he feels my traces in your hair / I’m sorry, love, but I don’t really care.” Down, boy!
The pace slackens once, with the mainly acoustic You & I, a forlorn ballad that builds to a huge finalé, complete with cosmic guitar solo. There are gently lolling, folky textures on current single Story of My Life and the Celtic-tinged Something Great, co-written by Styles and Lightbody.
But it is big anthems such as Little Black Dress that are the album’s real eye-openers. A genuinely affecting rocker underpinned by frenetic drum rolls, it is one of several tracks that cast the mop-topped Styles as a young Mick Jagger in sound and style, as well as looks.
A set of consistently strong pop songs, Midnight Memories will yield two or three more huge singles, and one can already picture the massed air-punching of fans when One Direction sing them live in open-air stadia on next summer’s Where We Are tour. – Daily Mail