In “tRuTh”, Zayn sings about his journey from boyband-singer to solo artist. It’s a well-known fact that Malik felt oppressed when he was still in One Direction. As he tells Complex Magazine:
"That [authenticity] was something that was always underlying, and ended up as the main factor of me leaving in the end. It was about denying the authenticity of who I was, and what I enjoyed about music, and why I got into it. That was always there. It was one of the things that wasn’t going to go away, so I had to go away." .