✎ 12.06.2021 // spent the morning alternating between studying and reading while enjoying a gingerbread latte—I've been trying to get through the book thief for a month or so and it just hasn't hooked me yet but I'm determined to finish it before the new year!
5 Second Of Summers Debut Album is ranked 17 in the Top 200 Aussie Albums of All Time
congratulations @5sos!!
5 Seconds of Summer, '5 Seconds of Summer'
Capitol Records/Hi Or Hey Records 2014
Storming the top of global charts inside a tornado of quotable lyrics, ripped jeans, and versatile musicality, 5 Seconds of Summer were anointed Australia’s most successful pop-punk export with this album. With it, the band became the first Australian act to achieve a US number one with a debut album, a record that topped the chart in another 13 countries.
Western Sydney born and bred, Michael Clifford, Luke Hemmings, Calum Hood, and Ashton Irwin were mere twinkles in their parents’ eyes when the first wave of pop-punk broke through in the early Nineties. Hemmings, Hood, and Clifford met at small private school Norwest Christian College and bonded over their shared music diet of bands like New Found Glory and blink-182. Famously building their fierce following on YouTube—at first with a cover of Mike Posner’s sentimental “Please Don’t Go” in 2011—Clifford reached out to Irwin via Facebook that same year and they played their first show in December at the Annandale Hotel. Twelve people showed up.
Just before 5 Seconds of Summer was released three years later, the band wereon tour with boy band behemoth One Direction. The global impact was palpable. 5SOS were too pop for Green Day and Sum 41 comparisons, too punk to be tagged with the “boy band” epithet (and they played their own instruments), and too ubiquitous to ignore. The wave of online support through social networks like Snapchat and Twitter meant that when the record’s first single was released, industry figures were already making bets on a number one album. With airtight riffs, Irwin’s crisp percussion—and just enough American lyric bait to appease US fans—“She Looks So Perfect” was infectious and unstoppable. Working closely with John Feldmann, the former leader of Warped Tour-era ska-punk band Goldfinger, 5SOS tapped a leader board of pop-punk songwriting royalty for the album. Jake Sinclair (Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco), Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low, and Benji and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte all helped the band hone their own brand of awkward flirtatiousness and romantic regret—throwing in plenty of scene-trait “whoa-oh-oh”s and “hey-ey-ey-ey”s along the way. Looking back, the collaborations and co-writes with some of their biggest musical influences would have been early bucket list completions for the four rearing adolescents. Hood had been a fan of All Time Low since he was 15 and Good Charlotte were Hemmings’ first ever rock show. “They’re the reason I wanted to be in a band,” Hemmings once told Rolling Stone. “I could relate to a band from a small town, talking about wanting to get out.”
Second single “Don’t Stop”, a clear highlight, marks the band’s biggest collaboration on the album with eight co-writers in the mix. The blend managed to spin teen crush magic with a side of angst. Surprise and delight elements are made all the more syrupy thanks to group harmonies and lyrics that straddle the line between fan demographics: “It gets harder for me / And you know it.” The visualiser for the single played out like a comic book strip. The band traded in their ripped T’s and skinny jeans for lycra as fans were introduced to superhero alter-egos Cal-Pal, SmAsh!, Mike-Ro-Wave, and Dr Fluke. At this point in their career, 5SOS were Australian heartthrobs who could back it up with their sonic makeover of pop-punk.
The record is full of versatility; from power pop ballads like “Everything I Didn’t Say”, “Beside You”, “Long Way Home”, and hit single “Amnesia”, to the emo paranoia of “Lost Boy”, and the gun-the-engine guitars in “End Up Here”, featuring handclaps instead of drums for the final chorus.
The album campaign and roll-out was almost poetic in its strategy. Even with the fact the band’s pre-release campaign trail was the One Direction global tour map (where they played to thousands of screaming fans across more than 100 dates), 5SOS HQ released multiple versions of the album. America received a version with appropriate alternate track “Mrs All American”, Japan received multiple bonus tracks, and the ten B-sides could have made an album on their own. The campaign culminated in one of the most iconic Rolling Stone magazine covers ever published in 2015. It depicted the band fully nude, grabbing their crotches to cover their nether regions, wearing only their song lyrics painted in black and red on their skin.
“I never in a million years would have said they would be on the cover of Rolling Stone in two years,” John Feldmann told Rolling Stone. “I had so many fucking people say that ‘guitars are over. They are over. It’s all EDM and programming. And that’s what people wanna hear.’ And thank God, they proved them all wrong.”