NEW YORK: No longer part of squeaky clean One Direction, Zayn Malik on January 29 reintroduced himself as a solo artiste — sexy with an urban vibe.

The former boy band star, now simply calling himself Zayn, announced his first solo album, Mind of Mine, which will come out on March 25, and released its first single, Pillowtalk.

A far cry from the innocent tracks of One Direction, Pillowtalk features sex, profanity and a racy video in which Malik dances intimately with model Gigi Hadid in states of undress.

Malik promises in the song to “be in bed all day,” taking a lover to “a place that is so pure, so dirty and raw.”

“It’s our paradise and it’s our war zone,” he sings.

In a striking lyrical touch for one of the most prominent Muslims in Western entertainment, Malik uses religious imagery to further the song’s theme.

“Pillowtalk — my enemy, my Allah,” he sings.

The 23-year-old Briton recorded the album largely in Los Angeles with the producer Malay, who is best known for his work with Frank Ocean.

In a likely sign of Malay’s influence, the music on Pillowtalk is noticeably inspired by urban American R&B, moving away from the bubble-gum pop of One Direction.

The album will come out exactly one year after Malik left One Direction, the band that emerged from The X Factor television contest in 2010 to become one of the world’s best-selling acts. Despite packing arenas full of screaming teenagers, Malik said in an interview just ahead of the release of Pillowtalk that he had long been unhappy in One Direction.

“I never really wanted to be there in the band,” he told Zane Lowe, the head DJ for Apple’s Beats 1 radio.

“I just gave it a go because it was there at the time and then when I realised the direction we were going in — pardon the pun — with the music, I instantly realised it wasn’t for me,” he said. “I couldn’t put my input in, I couldn’t give my opinion on this or that, because it didn’t fit,” he said.