Zayn Malik was never the loudest member of One Direction but since quitting the band back in March he has stayed very tight-lipped indeed. But the brooding Bradford boy has finally broken his silence in an interview with Fader magazine, and it looks like it will be worth the wait.

In a teaser clip released by Fader, Zayn rides around shirtless on a motorbike, jumps over a fence and sits staring wistfully into a fire.

Zayn told Fader: “Life experiences have just been influences for the album and just what I’ve been through especially in the last five years, with being in the band and everything.

Speaking of his new direction (pardon the pun) into solo music, he said “It’s quite a personal album and we recorded a lot of it actually out in the woods and stuff like this, which is quite weird.

“But it was just something that we wanted to do, because we wanted to make it quite real and genuine.”

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(Fader Magazine/YouTube)

He also touches on musical influences on his new album, including Bollywood and old school rap.

He added: “You know I used to listen to a lot of Bollywood being a kid and stuff, so yeah, that definitely influenced the music a little bit and then as I got older, I guess I just started to listening to a lot of my dad’s old records, like ’90s stuff. Like a lot of R&B and a lot of rap.”

On quitting superstardom with One Direction, he said: “It’s a nice feeling to come out of a place where you are being told what to do and behave a certain way”.

“Because of certain expectations or certain things that people want to see. It is just all my perspective and that’s fully liberating.

“I wouldn’t be able to give you one stand-out moment where I was like ‘this is what I want to do’ because I guess I always kind of knew.”

His full interview will be published on Fader’s website at 11pm GMT.