Every few weeks, Calum Hood pulls out his tarot deck and checks in with himself. He prefers the malleability of the cards to any kind of all-seeing clairvoyant. “I had this rant the other day,” the musician tells Rolling Stone over Zoom from Los Angeles. “I’m not big into psychics, because I don’t like being told by someone else. But I like being able to decide what it means for me.” There’s a freedom to the process, but also an inherent element of confrontation. Hood saw this mirrored in the motions of creating his debut solo album, Order Chaos Order, out June 13, over the past two years. Except instead of interpreting tarot spreads laid out in front of him, he pulled out more than a decade worth of memories.
“I’ve always really been heavily interested in any type of spiritual medium, just because I think what I’ve experienced has been so fucking weird and outlandish,” says Hood, who has played bass in the pop-rock band 5 Seconds of Summer since 2011. After being plucked from Australia as a teenager, his coming-of-age experience unfolded largely in studios, hotels, and tour buses thousands of miles away from home. “It’s pretty daunting [to look back on those early years in the band] because you’re kind of desensitized to the pace of life. I still have conversations about it, because eventually I want to move home, but it’s really not what I’m used to.” Hood’s resting state lies somewhere between the aching unrest and the hard-earned contentment that define Order Chaos Order.
“There’s a constant adapting to this overstimulation that has marked the last 15 years of my life,” he says. This bled into the album’s dizzying synths, cathartic confessions, and capsule-like storytelling. His frantic pleas on “Don’t Forget You Love Me” burn with self-condemnation, while standout “Sweet Dreams” offers a multi-perspective appraisal of addiction. “I think the reason why I waited for so long is so that I can tell these super personal stories from a place where I could actually articulate it and feel like I’m doing the concepts justice,” he says. “I wanted the album to be almost like someone was just in the room. Most of the songs are about a specific day or a specific moment because that’s how I remember them.”
Elsewhere, “Three of Swords” fills the space between both physical and emotional distance, and “Dark Circles” imagines an alternate universe in which 5SOS never existed. “We all felt like it was necessary to go and do our own thing, but still really want the band to be our home and for that to be the foundation of our musical identity and livelihoods,” Hood says. “We realize how rare it is for a group to have this sort of dynamic. Usually, you think everything’s going to shit if someone goes solo. Being able to rewrite that is pretty important for us.”
“The band has so many thoughts and stories because we’ve been living in this surrealistic world for so long,” he adds. A version of the existentialist outlook that cloaks Order Chaos Order appears in the splintered perspectives of each member’s solo work, and has become a recurring theme in 5SOS’ recent albums. “The mindset of going into it by myself was a little bit daunting,” Hood says. “But I think I’ve come out of this process a way stronger songwriter and I can take back to the band.” Below, he takes Rolling Stone through each song on Order Chaos Order, his own spiritual evaluation of the past.
“Don’t Forget You Love Me”
Sonically, it’s like a little more hypnotic than the rest of the tracks. It was towards the end of the process, as well. And it was one of those days where everything just came together. No one was saying no, no one was questioning it. It was really easy to tell such an intimate story in my life to them. I left feeling like, oh, this is a really important song for me, and also the lyric is so bare and naked and vulnerable that it felt important to lead with it. I’m not sure if there has been a breakthrough moment in terms of getting out of that scenario, but I remember when that line “Don’t forget you love me” was said to me. It bounced around in my head for weeks, and I was like, I just need to put this down somewhere. A lot of the album has been a gift in terms of being able to let things go, which is nice.
“Call Me When You Know Better”
This song, the more I read the lyrics, the more I’m like, “What the fuck am I even talking about?” Because there’s so many different perspectives coming in. It’s supposed to be a reflection of someone really spiraling down into their self-perpetuating pity thoughts. There’s also lyrics that are me picturing someone else saying [them] or picturing another scenario playing out where you’re deciding how someone else is feeling. There’s a lot that’s not based in reality and it’s more like a vortex of my own thoughts, as crazy as that sounds. There’s certain lyrics that are holding myself accountable for maybe not being the best friend, or the best son, or brother, or lover. It wasn’t too difficult for me to write, but when it was coming out, I was like, oh, this is actually showing a lot of myself.
“Sweet Dreams”
I’ve been around a lot of people who have been in servitude to a lot of things that aren’t great for them. And I think such a prominent theme within humanity is addiction. Being able to put it in a way that’s a little more like creating a fable for me to be able to express that side of me was really important. Honestly, it was liberating for me [to write from other perspectives]. I got a break from myself, which was nice. So I was able to tell it in a way that was unbiased. I was able to speak about things and realize how I actually feel about certain things through this unconscious flow of writing it over so long.
“I Wanted to Stay”
This was one of the first songs that was written for the album with [Day Wave’s Jackson Phillips], who produced a lot of it. At the start, candidly, I’d just write and see what intuitively would come out. I wrote the first verse on my birthday. One of my best friends gave me a painting and it said “Sun behind the sun.” I thought that was beautiful, so I based the whole verse around that. We had a few versions of that song in particular and it was missing a part for me. One day, I sat outside and the whole chorus came to me. It became like the conversations that you still have after someone or something has passed. It becomes a form of communicating still. As I get older, it goes all the way back to square one simplicity for me. What do I love? Who do I love? What do I cherish? Who do I cherish? It’s that simple for me.
“Sunsetter”
The first verse is more an ode to someone that you really love, and then the second verse is more talking to yourself. It’s a reminder for me that things can be pretty fragile and they can be taken away at a click of a finger. It reminds me, whenever I listen to it, to just be gentle. Be gentle with yourself and also cherish the amazing times that you spend with other people. That one feels like it comes from a pretty pure place for me. I originally wanted “Sunsetter” to be last, but it became the fifth track, which I actually really prefer now. I think it took a minute to get [the track list] right. I have a great team that I can use as a sound board as well. But I think the flow of it feels really good to me.
“All My Affection”
I think I wrote that about my dog. This song means different things to me on different days. It feels like it appeared out of nowhere. It feels almost like a totally different person wrote that song. I think it comes from a deep place of hurt, but also surrender. I didn’t even really think that I could put together an album by myself, if I’m honest. So to even get that far was a big feat for me, but I think along the whole journey, I felt like I was just becoming more comfortable with telling my story, and it became less about me, which is weird. It’s kind of, in a good way, a selfish thing to create a body of work that’s about your whole life. It became about the people I was working with and the art that we were creating. I think I became a better person because of it.
“Endless Ways”
This one feels way lighter than the rest of them. For some reason, to me, this one’s like when you’re in the good place of enjoying your life with other people and realizing how much of yourself you can see in humanity and in nature and in everything that is cycling throughout the day. That’s why it plays a really important part on the album. It feels a little less heady, which I like.
[Who in your life has been the most reflective mirror for yourself?] That’s a big question. Definitely the boys. Definitely the guys in the band, just because we know each other so well. We change really rapidly, because that’s the nature of how we want to evolve, especially with our music. In my family, probably my mom.
“Streetwise”
[This was inspired by] a documentary called Streetwise. It’s about these Seattle kids, they must be 12, and they kind of go rogue and live their lives on the streets. They paved their own way of life. There’s a scene where one boy is talking to a girl, and they’re in an abandoned hotel. She’s professing her love to him, and he’s worrying about, like, weed or getting his friend out of jail. And she’s head over heels for him. I thought that was such a lovely fragment of time. I found it really inspiring and based it all around that one scene.
[Did leaving home as a teenager to tour and consequently having such an unconventional coming-of-age experience help you slip into their perspective?] That’s the first time that I’ve framed it like that. That’s probably why I subconsciously really connected with those kids or this song. You just helped me learn that.
“Dark Circles”
This song is a spiral into this fantasy where the band doesn’t exist. You know that movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? It’s kind of like that, but if I remembered everything that happened. It’s such a big part of me, those guys and everything that that life has built for me. If that was taken away, I would be a half man, really. It’s really my love song to the guy, being like you guys make up so much of my DNA and the person that I am today. I wouldn’t be this without it. I’d be pretty distraught.
“Three of Swords”
[Home] is somewhere I can be a son and a brother, really, that’s it. It can be anywhere. My family’s culture is so deeply rooted in the land. And as I get older, I feel more and more disconnected from not being close to the land that my heritage is from. Anywhere close to them is where I feel the most childlike. It was super emotional for me to talk about it because I pictured myself as a child, and for some reason that makes everything way harder. Obviously, when you picture a child in any traumatic event, you’re going to feel more for that child because there’s a sense of purity within their outlook on life. It was difficult to dance with how I articulated the things that I was feeling. This is another song that is about a few things. This one in particular, especially when I listen to it now, it feels like I can finally let it rest. Whatever subconscious feeling, or pain, or hurt, or trauma — it’s not mine anymore.
