When Niall Horan was a kid, before he became a wildly famous pop star overnight, he would tune into a whimsical late-’90s children’s show called Bernard’s Watch. It was about a young boy who lived in the East Midlands of England and used a magical pocket watch to solve problems, or do whatever it was he felt like doing: listening to loud music, stealing car keys, playing pranks on his schoolteacher. “He pressed the button on the pocket watch and it would just stop time,” Horan, now 32, recalls in his signature drawn-out Irish brogue, smirking. “And he was the only one that could move.” Sweater by Brioni. Ring (pinkie, throughout) by Prounis. Ring (middle finger) by Bernard James. The memory of that show came to him last year while he was in Nashville writing the final songs on Dinner Party, his fourth studio album, set to debut on June 5. While recording the album, he’d spent so much of the year shuttling between London—where he lives with Amelia “Mia” Woolley, his girlfriend of over five years—and the United States that he’d grown accustomed to seeing his suitcase in the hallway. One night before he was set to travel again, the doom of his relentless schedule washed over him. “We’d had a few drinks, we had a couple of friends over, and then they left and I was just like, ‘Fuck, I have to leave tomorrow,’” he recalls. “The suitcase is getting packed again. I was like, ‘I don’t want to. I want to stay here with you and do what we do best, which is chilling and being at home.’” (By “you,” Horan means Woolley, who is a muse throughout the album, including the lead single, “Dinner Party,” out March 20.) The resulting track, “Little More Time,” may as well be an anthem for any 30something looking down the barrel of midlife. In the nostalgic early-aughts jam, Horan sings about turning clocks upside down, stretches out each melody and verse like it’s stuck in honey, and begs for one more song like a reveler coming to terms with last call at their favorite karaoke bar—a Bernard’s Watch for the adults in the room. “In my head, I was thinking: All right, can we just stop it here? And we’re the only ones that can move. The plane can’t take off that I’m about to get on,” he explains.