A review of a One Direction album needs to be accompanied by a bit of context. After all, most 13-year-old girls would give it a five star rating before they’d even finished listening to the first song.

I’m not a 13-year-old girl, but I have to confess that at some point during the summer, I somehow became a closet ‘Directioner’. I realised this after receiving several texts asking why my Spotify profile showed that I’d been listening to One Direction for the past hour. After that fiasco, I found myself quite regularly using private listening mode in order to hide my secret addiction. This whole situation culminated in an ‘ironic’ (read ‘completely serious’) viewing of their film, This Is Us, in September.

The question you’re probably asking at this point is “WHY?” A few months ago, I’d have asked the same thing. I generally dislike manufactured pop, and it’s pretty much universally agreed that artists with proper integrity write all their own songs and play their own instruments. Not to mention that any 1D purchase inevitably puts more cash into Simon Cowell’s grubby little hands.

But one thing is hard to ignore; that, though their success may be manufactured and image-driven, they’re still making great pop music. And we need pop music sometimes.

With this new album, they’ve not really attempted to move away from their squeaky-clean sound, but some sort of weird post-punk One Direction album would be so wrong. The first two tracks, their latest singles ‘Best Song Ever’ and ‘Story Of My Life’, really show off their feel-good pop vibe. I challenge you to find a more uplifting getting-ready-to-go-out song than ‘Best Song Ever’ after a dull day of essay-writing. Some of the tracks even have an (almost)meaningful feel, such as ‘Half A Heart’.

It’s to their credit that the boys have had more creative input into this particular album, with Louis and Liam apparently writing most of the tracks themselves.I think their main issue is simply repetitiveness – they’ve cracked their sound and they’re keeping it, but perhaps keeping it too consistently. Some tentative rock influences do dart in now and then, notably in ‘Little Black Dress’, but you can’t listen to the album the whole way through without getting bored of the sound. However, each perfectly formed little nugget of pop makes its way into your head just in the way you’d expect from a 1D album, and I hope they keep making them like this.

Even if I will still be listening in secret.