Louis Tomlinson Describes Watching BTS ‘Take’ One Direction’s Records: ‘It Was Just a Bit of a Shame’
Written by admin on January 12, 2026
“That’s the nature of the music industry, it keeps moving,” the singer adds in his Billboard cover story.
Louis Tomlinson photographed on Nov. 19, 2025, in Los Angeles.
Austin Hargrave
Trending on Billboard
Louis Tomlinson knows more than anyone just how fast the night changes, from being part of the biggest boy band in the world to watching the members of BTS take that label for themselves in recent years.
In his Billboard cover story published Monday (Jan. 12), Tomlinson tells executive director of music Jason Lipshutz that despite not paying “loads of attention to” the success of other groups post-1D, the Bangtan Boys’ astronomical rise has been impossible to ignore. “There was a time when BTS was on the way up, and I felt like, every time I logged into Twitter, they’d just taken one of our records for something — some fastest selling thing, and they’d take it away!” the British singer playfully laments.
“It was just a bit of a shame! But I don’t begrudge them that — that’s the nature of the music industry, it keeps moving,” Tomlinson continues.
That said, the star thinks there hasn’t “been anything similar, really” to the phenomenon of 1D back in its heyday in the 2010s. “I’m sure people are trying, but I think what was really interesting about One Direction [was] pretty much every boy band that had come before us would fit into a quite specific mold,” he adds. “There was a way of doing boy bands back in the day — dressing in the same outfits, dancing. We broke free from that mold.”
Tomlinson’s cover story comes just a couple of weeks ahead of his next solo album, How Did I Get Here?, which is due out Jan. 23. It also follows a deeply difficult year or so for the singer and his former bandmates, who have had to grieve the untimely loss of Liam Payne following the “Strip That Down” artist’s death in October 2024.
“Naturally, there is a closeness — it definitely feels closer than it was,” Tomlinson tells Lipshutz of his dynamic with Harry Styles, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik in the aftermath of Payne’s death. “But I think we’re all so busy, it’s hard to keep that consistency. It also depends person to person. Like, Niall — and hopefully he’d say the same about me — we could not exchange a text in a whole year and then go for a beer and literally be chatting nonstop.”
See Tomlinson on the cover of Billboard below.
