Louis Tomlinson recently opened up about the 15th anniversary of One Direction’s formation, which marked a bittersweet milestone without his late friend Liam Payne.

In an emotional interview with Rolling Stone U.K., Tomlinson shared his struggles with grief, revealing that losing Payne was “impossibly difficult” and brought back feelings of injustice and frustration.

“It’s very different. I’ve never lost a friend before,” Tomlinson said, reflecting on his experiences with loss, including the passing of his mother, Johannah Deakin, to leukemia in 2016, and his younger sister Félicité Tomlinson, who accidentally overdosed in 2019.

Despite being “relatively well-versed in grief,” Tomlinson found that losing Payne was a unique and profound challenge.

Tomlinson also paid tribute to Payne’s guidance and leadership within One Direction, describing him as the “safest pair of hands” in the group.

“We were all just so amateur, but he was already where he needed to be by the time he did his first [X Factor] audition,” Tomlinson said, highlighting Payne’s maturity and influence.

Payne’s untimely death on October 16, 2024, shocked fans worldwide. The 31-year-old singer fell multiple stories from a balcony at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with an investigation determining his cause of death as “polytrauma” due to multiple injuries involving internal and external hemorrhaging.

A toxicology report revealed traces of alcohol, cocaine, and prescription antidepressants in his system at the time of his death.