ZAYN says he and Webb took “a lot of reference from old gangster movies that I grew up watching – Casino, Goodfellas and so on. I used to watch a lot of aggressive shooting movies.
I wanted to come back and give my fans something along those lines rather than just some blasé video.” “The early ‘90s, around that period, people really tried to make these epic, intense movies for their videos, Michael Jackson being a great example of that. “It’s definitely a nod to a particular era of music videos,” he tells FACT about its Marc Webb-directed video, a Chinatown heist mini-movie crammed into five action-packed minutes. After the sleek, chrome sounds and carefully curated cast of underground collaborators on his 2016 album Mind Of Mine stressed an intimate, adult new direction, what arrived yesterday was a stadium ballad produced by pop production maestro Greg Kurstin, assisted by Sia and doused in Hollywood spectacle. ZAYN dropped the first single from his upcoming second album yesterday, marking the start of a new chapter in his sharply-watched evolution from boy band hitmaker to R&B solo success. But the bombastic ‘Dusk Till Dawn’ wasn’t what some predicted.
The 24-year-old reveals the childhood inspiration behind his blockbuster video for ‘Dusk Till Dawn’ – the first single from an upcoming second album full of pop experiments searching for “what’s out of character in R&B.”