Here’s Why Zayn Malik Says He ‘Completely Selfishly’ Left One Direction

March 25, 2015, lives on in infamy for One Direction fans as the beginning of the end — aka, when Zayn Malik decided to leave the band. But in a candid new interview on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, the 30-year-old pop star hinted that if he hadn’t separated from the group to pursue his own solo career, one of the other five guys probably would have sooner rather than later.

“There was a lot of … look, I don’t want to go into too much detail, but there was a lot of politics going on,” Malik told Cooper on the Wednesday (July 12) episode, careful not to call out ex-bandmates Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson by name. “Certain people were doing certain things, certain people didn’t want to sign contracts, so I knew something was happening. So I just got ahead of the curve.”

“If I’m being honest with you, I was like, ‘I’m just going to get out of here.’ I think this is done and I just seen it, and I completely selfishly wanted to be the first person to go and make my own record if I’m being completely honest with you,” he added. “I’m a passive dude, but when it comes to my music and my business, I’m serious about it and I’m competitive, so I wanted to be the first to go and do my own thing.”

Malik — who announced earlier this week that his new single “Love Like This” will drop July 21 — also admitted that by the end of his run with the boy band, everyone was little bit tired of one another. “We’ve been together every day for five years and we’ve got sick of each other, if I’m being completely honest,” he admitted.

“We were close. We done crazy things with each other that nobody else in the world will ever understand or have those experiences that we’ve shared with each other, and I look back on it now in a much fonder light than I would’ve as I just left,” he continued. “There were great experiences, I had great times with them, but yeah, we just run our course.”

Listen to the full episode below: