Louis Tomlinson Talks Grabbing the Solo ‘Spotlight’ on Debut Album ‘Walls’

Plus: New music from Demi Lovato, Lil Wayne, Dua Lipa & more on “First Stream Live” podcast.

All the new music coming out this week has Billboard buzzing, but luckily we've got fans covered on who dropped what and what they had to say about their latest releases.

Billboard's First Stream Live podcast (listen below) recaps Demi Lovato's new single "Anyone," which she debuted in her tear-jerking performance at the 2020 Grammys on Sunday, Lil Wayne's 14th studio album Funeral, Drake and Future's "Life Is Good" follow-up collab "Desires," Kesha's High Road LP, Meghan Trainor's latest Treat Myself and more.

Louis Tomlinson stepped into the spotlight alone with his debut solo album Walls, but he broke down the lengthy process of putting it all together in an exclusive interview with Billboard on Friday.

"You might work on a certain sound for 12 months and then be like, 'I'm gonna scrap this, this doesn't quite work,'" Tomlinson told Billboard. "Obviously, naturally coming out of a band like One Direction, the spotlight is on me. So I have to kind of develop…. If you look back at my first two solo songs, the song with Steve Aoki and the song with Bebe Rexha, it's like a world away from what I've ended up with on Walls. And I think I had to go for those moments in my career of kind of improvising on the job and working out, crafting exactly what felt authentic to me."

But the real "a-ha!" moment came during the impromptu recording process of "Kill My Mind," the second single from Walls, which was written three days apart from the title track. "Before that song, I had a lot of frustrating sessions — not necessarily in terms of quality, but more down to taste and the way certain productions were sounding," he revealed. "We got into the studio and we wrote 'Kill My Mind,' and it was written with a deliberate statement of intent of mixing things up and seeing where we ended up with it. … That was a real breakthrough moment on the album because that was where I wanted to be sonically."

For more breakthrough moments this week in music, check out the latest episode of Billboard's First Stream Live podcast below.