Flicker is the debut studio album by Irish singer Niall Horan. It was released on 20 October 2017 by Neon Haze Music and Capitol Records. "This Town" was released on 29 September 2016 as the album's lead single, followed by "Slow Hands", "Too Much to Ask", "On the Loose", and "Seeing Blind". Flicker debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at number one sellling 152,000 units in the U.S., Horan's first number one album in the U.S. as a solo artist. Background In June 2016, Horan confirmed that he was working on his first studio album, saying, "I've been in the studio writing bits and pieces. It's just for fun at the moment. I've made relationships with different writers up and down the years so I'm putting them into action now." In September 2016, it was announced that Horan had signed a solo deal with Capitol Records. Talking to the Daily Star Horan said, "I have been working on [the album] since March 2016. It has been a year and a half in the making and it is finally time for people to hear it." In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Horan said the album was inspired by classic rock acts including Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. "Whenever I would pick up a guitar, I would always naturally play chords like that, and finger pick a lot and play that folky kind of style." He also described the collection as having a "folk-with-pop feel to it". In August 2017, Horan debuted several songs from the album during a live show at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London. He revealed that he had contacted Maren Morris asking her to contribute to his song "Seeing Blind". On 15 September 2017, Horan announced the album on his social media accounts, revealing the album's title, cover art, and release date as well as the release of the third single from the album, "Too Much to Ask". The track list was unveiled on 22 September 2017. Horan told Zane Lowe on his Beats 1 radio show that the album's title track, "Flicker", meant the most to him and "was a very poignant moment in the recording process", to the extent that "it changed the way I recorded the rest of the album". He also expressed in his op-ed for The Independent that the album O by Damien Rice had inspired the production of the aforementioned track