Niall Horan: The Show [CAPITOL]

Why you'll love it

This Capitol LP comes with a print of one of the album's lyrics in Horan's handwriting. The Show topped the charts in eight countries, led by the single "Heaven."

This edition

• Handwritten lyric print included

About the album

Niall Horan's second album came out the very week the world went into lockdown in 2020, which, as he put it on Late Night with Seth Meyers, some would call great timing. The tour was cancelled, and he spent a long while waiting for the creative juices to flow. When they finally did, they came out sounding like a man of 30 rather than a boy-band graduate.

The Show leans into rock and synth-pop with a warmer, more grown-up touch. "Heaven" was the lead single, written at a writers' camp and given an acoustic outing on The Late Late Show with James Corden; "Meltdown" followed with a bouncy, nervy energy, and he took it to The Voice. "You Could Start A Cult" is a quiet, devoted ballad that later picked up an encore version with Lizzy McAlpine, while "Never Grow Up" and "Science" show off his gift for a soft-focus chorus.

Horan told NME that the pandemic and a few relationships had made him grow up without noticing, and the record wears that maturity well. This time he even got to go on tour, which, for a man with an album called The Show, seemed the polite thing to do.

Also at Kops: more Niall Horan on vinyl · browse Pop

Tracklist

Listen

On Capitol Records (cat# B003695501), the 2023 album.