Songfacts®:

• This sultry slice of soulful pop finds Niall Horan flirting with a girl in a bar. However, the bar is crowded, the girl is fickle, and she keeps disappearing.
• The song was inspired by a brief flirtation Horan had with a woman during a night out with some pals. The singer explained to Billboard that he started chatting up a girl who was with a group of her friends. Every time he turned around, she seemed to disappear, but they continued to bump into each other in different bars throughout the course of the night.
  
  He added: "It's a song that is basically like a movie that is based on a true story, and then you start changing stuff that makes the song start to sound a little bit more interesting."
• Niall Horan wrote the song with Tobias Jesso, Jr. (Florence + the Machine, Adele) and Ruth-Anne Cunningham (John Legend, Pentatonix). It was produced by Julian Bunetta (One Direction, Maroon 5). The same quartet penned his hit single "Slow Hands."
• Horan first collaborated with his fellow Irish native Ruth-Anne Cunningham when she co-wrote One Direction's 2014 track "Where Do Broken Hearts Go." When the pop star recorded his debut solo album, Flicker, he reached out and they penned five of the record's 10 tracks together.
  
  They reconnected for his second album, but Cunningham was touring and had less time. The pair managed two days together and penned "Nice To Meet Ya" on the second day.
• The track is decidedly rockier than Horan's previous material. Cunningham commented to Official Charts.com that it gives her "2000s rock, Kasabian/Arctic Monkeys vibes."
• The song's music video was directed by the Young Astronauts production company (Ariana Grande's "Dangerous Woman") and shot in London. It shows the Irishman hitting the bar with his pals and flirting with a girl.
• Niall Horan recalled to Radio.com that the session that produced "Nice To Meet Ya" wasn't proving productive until he found the spark from a riff.
  
  "Nothing was really happening for a long time, and I just picked up an electric guitar and started messing around and started playing that riff in the middle of the song," he recalled. "From there it just kind of kicked off. A lot of shouting and screaming. A lot of gang vocals, trying all of our best melodies, throwing them aside and then coming back and making a bit of a jigsaw."
• Niall Horan recalls during the song how after chatting to the girl for a while, she gave him her phone number.
  
  I want your number tattooed on my arm in ink, I swear
  
  The girl actually wrote her number down on a piece of paper," he explained in a Genius attribution. "In a world where we're like looking at your phone, everyone showing numbers, swapping contacts, all this, and I like the idea of the actual physical piece of paper with a number on it."
  
  Horan added that when he's writing songs based on a true story he likes to elaborate on what actually happened to make it more interesting. In this instance he latched onto the visual of the girl writing the number down; he switched it up to be like a music video where someone is looking over the arm and it's got like a phone number on it. "I just thought it was a quite colorful lyric," he said.