One Direction member Liam Payne and TikTok star Dixie D’Amelio have collaborated on a Christmas song for the holidays. The “Naughty List” audio dropped on Oct. 29 via Liam Payne’s YouTube account. 

Liam Payne is famous for the breakout boy band of the 2000s known as One Direction. Dixie D’Amelio got her fame more recently from being the sister of Charli D’Amelio. This year, she made her debut as a musical artist. 

While it’s only November, the influencer Christmas singles are already starting to plague the internet. Christmas carols have been a booming genre of music for a very long time and seem to be a genre that all music artists love to dip their toes in at some point in time. Part of the “Christmas Spirit” are the bad Christmas songs released by musicians every year. It has almost become a tradition in and of itself. 

This song in particular is no exception. It is just as corny and underwhelming as the ones we’ve seen in the past. With the dry lyrics, tired concept and sad vocals, this song is just another attempt at a Christmas song by more internet starlets.

This song details a scene similar to the holiday classic “Let It Snow” or “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” where the two singers are seemingly trapped together due to the weather. 

The concept of the song is more or less tired. We’ve heard millions of renditions and remixes to both of the classics and the attempts at creating something similar are a bit old.

Liam’s verses are not very well written and do not pair well with the beat of the song. Most of the lyrics, in general, are very basic and not well thought out. They also are not singing with the song’s beat, so it sounds like a jumbled mess. 

For example, “The driver messaged, said he’s stuck in the snow / I said there’s no way I’m not walking you home / Next thing you know it we were drying our clothes / But I didn’t mean to get you in trouble (no),” really did not go with the plot of the story and had me really confused as to why the person would “get in trouble.”

They did the bare minimum in the lyrics category, in my opinion. Overall, I think anyone could have looked at “Let It Snow,” changed a few words up, and the lyrics would have been better. The ball was dropped on this one. 

Liam’s voice clearly does not go with the song either. Dixie’s voice, which we all know is very good, is too heavily autotuned for my taste. Neither vocals fit in with the beat of the song and are almost too quiet to hear. Dixie isn’t showcased in the song very much; however, when she is, it’s not her best work and the same for Liam.

As a fan of both Liam and Dixie, this was a huge disappointment. Dixie’s breakout single “Be Happy,” while inherently cringey and meme-worthy, was not completely awful and Liam Payne’s past solo hits were okay.

Both of the artists are very talented, but this song was not it for me. This opinion seems to be an unpopular one considering the like/dislike radio on the YouTube video. Currently, it has 365K likes, 3.6K dislikes and is sitting at 2.6 million views. 

The collaboration of these artists, while a good idea in theory, was just a miss. Neither artist put their all into this song and it shows. Their voices are amazing and they have both proven that they can deliver much better than this.