Songfacts®:

• This strings-laden track is about the last night in a failing relationship.
  
  There's a light in the dark
  Still a flicker of hope that you first gave to me
  That I wanna keep
  Please don't leave
  
  Niall Horan is despairing that the relationship has run its course. He is left clinging to that very first flicker of hope his lover gave him.
• The song was helmed by Nashville-based producer/engineer Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Kings of Leon). Niall Horan told Beats 1's Zane Lowe during a FaceTime interview how the recording of the song led to a breakthrough in creating the Flicker album:
  
  "It was a very poignant moment in the recording process. We were sitting in a full session band at EastWest studios in LA we were in with Jacquire and I said when we record 'Flicker' I want to be really delicate with this I don't want to overproduce this and he got it straight away. I went into the booth and recorded with my acoustic guitar and after two or three takes everyone's kind of sitting there looking at the walls thinking 'this is quite the pretty song' and I was feeling the same and we took a break. No one spoke to each other and it was quite strange and I felt like there was a real carefulness in the recording process during this song and it changed the way I recorded the rest of the album."
• Niall Horan told Fresh 102.7's morning team Karen & Jeffrey this is the Flicker track which hits him the most, emotionally.
  
  "[It's] probably the most personal one to me and it was a big moment in the making of the album," he explained. "The whole timing of that song and when I recorded it kind of stood out to me. It's just one of those songs that even when I'm singing it I close my eyes - you know when you're listening to music at night lying in bed? I kind of get into that thing when I'm performing it. It's one of those songs where the room just goes... you could literally hear a cotton bud drop if you wanted to. It gets me every time."