One Direction – five songs that prove their pop star prowess

One Direction have been a boyband of atypical design, thrown together arbitrarily in a reality show instead of precisely generated in a laboratory somewhere in Orlando or Manchester. Their music is also relatively incongruous to their station: instead of drawing on modern pop forms, most of their songs are written and performed as a kind of fluorescent pop-rock, which has deepened expressively and aerobically with each successive album. It’s pop music, but it’s anchored to the expansive and athletic dimensions of stadium rock; genetically they’re less derived from Take That and Backstreet Boys than from Queen and Def Leppard.

Also unusual for a singles-oriented boyband: their best songs are emphatically not their singles. The inevitable One Direction greatest hits collection will generally coast on uneven bluster and digressive ballads. Of the following five songs, which I consider the best in their catalogue so far, only one was released as a single.

Kiss You

The third and most effective single from their second album Take Me Home. (The first, Live While We’re Young, was an adequate and enjoyable clone of their first hit, What Makes You Beautiful; the second, Little Things, is a somewhat disorganised ballad, given depth and power by their individual performances.) The best One Direction songs tend to share a kind of velocity, simulating the tempo and design of a crush. There’s a syllabic rhythm to the verses which makes the yawning vowels of the chorus (“tou-ou-ouch”) aerial and cathartic.

Still the One

One Direction’s team rewrote What Makes You Beautiful at least five times, and this is its most formally perfect and combustible expression, as if What Makes You Beautiful were undergoing rapid cellular divisions. The synths in the chorus seem to mirror the elastic qualities of their voices, and when they combine, it’s just like getting totally inverted by a feeling.

Strong

The Mumford & Sons-esque exercises on Midnight Memories feel both extremely successful and mysteriously dated in 2015; when I listen to them now, it’s like hearing a form of pop music thaw at its peak efficacy. Strong is motivated by a jangly acoustic guitar, but beyond that, it’s so ambiently detailed: the dense swirls of electric guitar in the chorus radically expand an otherwise tense and narrowly structured song.

No Control

That “shared velocity” I mentioned earlier: this is probably its peak expression, a song about how great and overwhelming and landscape-melting it is to have sex with someone you think is cool. No Control is as muscular and flexible as a Cheap Trick song, though the rhythms of the chorus are imported from the Killers’ Mr Brightside.

Stockholm Syndrome

Their funkiest song, which means all of its focus is on the space between snare hits and the tension and anxiety that space generates. Over this they construct an unfortunate analogy that relates Stockholm syndrome – in which a hostage develops empathy for their kidnapper – to the consuming effect of someone’s embrace. The quality of their performance is distracting enough that it works. The chorus (“Baby look what you’ve done to me!”) is sung almost reflexively. After four albums the group have learned to deftly navigate their own songs; they weave through the atmosphere instead of flattening it.