Songfacts®:

• The second single from Niall Horan's debut solo album, this was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by frequent One Direction songwriter Julian Bunetta.
• The single has a funkier, sexier groove than Horan's debut release, "This Town." "The whole song was pretty off-the-cuff. I wanted it to be a little bit cheeky with the lyric," Niall told Siriux XM Hits 1's Mikey Piff. "We wrote this concept about being in the bar."
  
  "The first line of the song is 'We should take this back to my place' - usually that's what the guy would say, but we flipped it that the girl would say that, and that's what she said right to my face," he continued. "With the song, before we even wrote lyrics, we had this big track and it sounded quite sexy. So we thought that this concept would match the vibe of the song, and I think we might have been right."
• The song was one of the last to be written for the album. "I wrote this one, probably, in February," Horan said. "I just thought, 'You know what? I'm missing a bit of grit. Something a bit more funky, something with a bit heavier bass.' That's what I set out to do."
  
  "And then I was listening to a lot of late '70s, early '80s people like Don Henley," he continued. "When he went solo in the early '80s, he just had this funky kind of feel to it - heavy bass, heavy guitar. So I thought, 'Let's give this a crack.' And then it just kind of happened, within a few hours, it was brilliant."
• Niall was asked about the inspiration for the song during a Fresh 102.7 Up Close and Personal event with fans:
  
  "'Slow Hands' was just random, it happened out of nowhere," he replied. "There was no real heavy inspiration behind this one, it was just a fun song to write, one that we wrote really fast - it's just kind of cool and sexy I guess. Musically it's inspired by what I grew up on, like early '80s classic funk-rock."
• Julian Bunetta recalled the story of the song. "We were in the studio and I had a bass on with a drum loop," he told Billboard magazine. "We started playing these notes and it felt good."
  
  "Niall was singing along, mumbling some words and it sounded like he said 'slow hands' at one point," Bunetta continued. "We were like, 'What's slow hands?' We kept on chiseling away and wound up having a good back and forth with it."