The former One Direction singer died in Buenos Aires on Oct. 16
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Liam Payne had long been vocal about his struggles with mental health and addiction before his death on Oct. 16 at age 31.
Policía Federal Argentina confirmed to PEOPLE that the singer died after falling from a balcony at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires. The incident remains under investigation, and whether his death was an accident or suicide has not yet been determined.
The former One Direction singer previously explained that he’d used alcohol to cope with the massive success of One Direction, telling Men’s Health Australia that “it’s difficult when you have the level of fame that we had in the band.”
“There have been a lot of people in trouble with mental health that aren’t really getting the help that they need, and I think that’s a bit of a problem in our industry,” he told the outlet in 2019. “It’s the same s— that happens to everyone, that’s been happening since the ‘70s. You know what the traps are and if you are lucky enough, like me, to be able to get out of that scenario and back into a sense of normality, then you know it’s a bit different.”
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He compared going onstage with that of a Walt Disney World character actor, saying it was like “putting the Disney costume on.”
“I was [drunk] quite a lot of the time because there was no other way to get your head around what was going on,” he said. “I mean, it was fun. We had an absolute blast, but there were certain parts of it where it just got a little bit toxic.”
In a 2021 episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, Payne said he’d experienced suicidal thoughts during his time in One Direction.
“I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be,” he said. “Where’s rock bottom for me? And you would never have seen it. I’m very good at hiding it. No one would ever have seen it… There is some stuff that I have definitely never, never spoken about. It was really, really, really severe. And it was a problem. And it was only until I saw myself after that, I was like, ‘Right, I need to fix myself.’ “
In July 2023, Payne announced he was celebrating six months of sobriety, telling fans in a YouTube video that he’d spend nearly 100 days in a rehab facility in Louisiana.
“I just kind of feel like I’ve got more of a grip on life and everything that was getting away from me. I just feel like I’ve got more of a handle on it,” he said. “I just needed to take a little bit of time out for myself, actually, because I kind of became somebody who I didn’t really recognize anymore. And I’m sure you guys didn’t either. I was in bad shape up until that point and I was really happy to kind of put a stopper to life and work.”
The star said he enjoyed being off the grid, as it helped him focus on his recovery. Still, it wasn’t until he attended a Hans Zimmer concert in January 2023 that he had the a-ha moment that inspired him to give up drinking.
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“I watching this beautiful symphony, I was having a drink, and I thought, ‘You know what? This isn’t really serving me at all. I don’t really need this right now,’ ” Payne recalled. “It’s the first time I’ve ever put a drink down and gone to someone else, ‘You finish this, I don’t need this right now.’ And I haven’t picked one up since, which has almost been six months, which I’m excited about.”
“It’s good. It’s good to be in this position,” he added. “I definitely don’t need those things anymore. The party’s over.”
In addition to Payne, the band, which consisted of Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, and Louis Tomlinson, rose to fame after competing on The X-Factor in 2010. Malik left in 2015, and the group later announced an indefinite hiatus.
“There was obviously underlying issues within our friendships, too. We’d been together every day for five years and we got sick of each other,” Malik, 31, told Call Me Daddy‘s Alex Cooper in 2023.
“We were close. We’d done crazy things with each other that nobody else in the world will ever understand or have the experiences that we’ve shared with each other,” Malik said, “and I look back on it now in a much fonder light than I would have as I’d just left. There were great experiences, I had great times with them. But, yeah, we had just run our course.”
The year prior, Styles, 30, told Zane Lowe, “There is very much respect between all of us, if we did something together. And that is something that you can’t really undo. And you know, it’s like a very deep love for each other, I think.”
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In 2023, Payne addressed a June 2022 interview with Logan Paul where he spoke critically about his former bandmates, while also revealing he completed 100 days in rehab.
“My own frustrations with my own career and where I kind of landed, I took shots at everybody else, which is wrong,” Payne said in an eight-minute YouTube video. “So obviously, I want to apologize for that because that’s definitely not me.”
In May 2024, Payne’s former fiancée Maya Henry spoke exclusively to PEOPLE about her novel Looking Forward, which was written during her relationship with the singer.
Though she admitted much of the book was fiction, she told PEOPLE, “When you love someone so much, you have those rose-colored glasses. You’re in denial, so you think those things will stop, and they don’t, and that just becomes an issue among other issues.”
Payne is survived by son Bear Grey, 7, with his ex, singer Cheryl.
