As a highly dedicated member of Zayn’s squad (Zquad works fabulously), I spent all of Thursday evening fanatically googling Pillowtalk, Malik’s first single post departure both from One Direction, as well as from his days of catchy mainstream pop. When it finally released, I spent $1.29 to buy it and what felt like 11 years of my life trying to like it.

Suffice to say, it wasn’t the best.

Technically, there really isn’t much wrong with Pillowtalk. It has all the makings of any catchy contemporary RnB tune, and coupled with its rather raunchy music video, is almost guaranteed commercial success. Sadly, this doesn’t prevent it from sounding like a song written at the break of pubescence, where the only attempt at depth comes from throwing in a couple of fucks every six lines or so. The sheer literality of the lyrics feels so artificial, so purposefully sexual, so manufactured, that Malik’s notion of “real music” becomes an embarrassing cliché, aimed at drawing in listeners who consider One Direction's songs too passé for their refined tastes.

That isn’t even the problem, though. The real issue is that somewhere in this horrendous jumble, you can hear echoes of the magnificence that is Malik’s voice. That lovely, refined falsetto is wasted on this monotone track. Where are those gorgeous melismas of the You and I days? In his attempt to break away from the One Direction bubble, he seems to have lost the one thing he really had going for him: his ability to sing.

We’ve seen this before, the notorious child star syndrome. We’ve seen it in Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato and, most notably, Miley Cyrus. We’ve seen them dipping in and out of controversy after controversy, using each one to carve out an image of rebellion, of something that reeks of hormones and experimentation.

Contained in itself, there’s nothing wrong with this urge. The problem with Malik following the Miley Cyrus trajectory isn’t that he won’t make it in the industry, especially considering he already has a gaggle of mesmerized women willing to kill for him (me). It’s that in his attempt to move beyond these women, into the world of “real music,” he’ll waste countless hours, infinite amounts of talent on trying to make himself seem different, seem better than the life he claims to have left behind. Despite his inability to recognize this, his attempts at breaking away will inevitably be as commercialized, as cliché as any of the overplayed pop One Direction ever made, and at least they owned up to it. What screams “I really want to be rebellious but also want to be a commercial success” more than a song about sex with a video featuring your girlfriend who also happens to be a Victoria’s Secret model? There is a certain hypocrisy wrapped up in this phase of experimentation that will remain Malik’s greatest antagonist, until he’s able to separate the need for marketable rebellion from what he so confidently asserts as “real music.”