ZAYN

Of everything in his father's collection, Zayn traces one thread straight to a single song. "It's called Sufi," he told Dazed. "It's a religious style of music that's like a deep meditation prayer where you just sit and sing the same melody over and over — it's meant to get you into a trance state. A lot of Indian singers used to do that back in the day, like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He was played throughout my house, and my dad used to listen a lot to that style of music. So that influenced me from an early age." The result: "fLoWer," Mind of Mine's Urdu-language interlude.

listen: upstream & heresource: Dazed — Zayn Malik ↗share

1990

Mustt MusttNusrat Fateh Ali Khan

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2016

fLoWerZAYN

listen forPut Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's "Mustt Mustt" (1990) next to "fLoWer" and listen for the same trance logic Zayn described — a single melodic idea circling and intensifying rather than building toward a chorus. Pitchfork heard the transplant land: "there's also something gorgeous and spectral to his voice on the intermission... he snaps with ease into the perpendicular arrangement of notes." It's the qawwali habit of repetition, not a Western pop structure, driving both records toward the same hypnotic, unresolved close.

Asked to name his influences, Zayn goes straight to the source: "My main influences in music came from my dad," he told The FADER in 2015. "It was a lot of R&B, a lot of R. Kelly, a lot of Usher, a lot of Donell Jones, a lot of Prince." R. Kelly sat at the top of that list, the record his father reached for most, and the debt surfaces on "Drunk," Mind of Mine's hazy late-summer ballad — the same lazy, half-murmured delivery over a groove built to be walked through slowly, not danced to.

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2003

Ignition (Remix)R. Kelly

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2016

DrunkZAYN

listen forNME's Gavin Haynes heard it too, describing "Drunk" as "an R&B torch song somewhere between Mario's Let Me Love You and R. Kelly's Ignition (Remix)" when Zayn cued it up during their 2016 interview. Play Kelly's 2003 late-night classic against "Drunk" and listen for the same unhurried, lightly slurred vocal drifting just behind the beat rather than driving it — both songs turn a hook into something closer to a mumbled confession than a chorus, built for a room that's already dim and half-empty.

Prince gets his own paragraph in Zayn's account of his musical education. "A lot of starting references for me are technology and Prince," he told Dazed in 2016, days after Prince's death. "I'm conscious in the back of my head of how he was sort of bold and fearless in the way he decided to dress. He created another world with the clothes he wore." The reverence carries past the wardrobe: "Pillowtalk," his debut single, works the same trick Prince mastered — stripping a track down to almost nothing so a high, breathy voice can do all the work.

listen: upstream & heresource: Dazed — Zayn Malik ↗share

1986

KissPrince

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2016

PillowtalkZAYN

listen forCue Prince's "Kiss" (1986) beside "Pillowtalk" (2016) and notice how little either song actually asks of its band: a dry, clipped guitar or synth pulse, a bassline that barely announces itself, and space left wide open around the vocal. Both singers use that emptiness the same way, letting a thin, high falsetto carry the hook alone rather than competing with a full arrangement — the minimalism is the seduction, not an accident of budget.