This past weekend, cryptic posters popped up around the world reading “Your Favorite Boy Band Is Coming Back,” along with a URL: YourFavoriteBoyBand.com.
It wasn’t immediately clear who the red and yellow flyers belonged to, but the site was soon updated to include a quiz to help confused visitors figure it out. It asked users about their preferred singing competition series as well as boy-band archetypes — the loud one, the quiet one, the funny one, the wild one — and dress codes, from skinny jeans to all-white outfits and oversize streetwear. Every combination of responses led to the same answer: “Your favorite boy band is 5 Seconds of Summer.” It only took them almost 15 years, but now, the Australian pop-rock band is coming around to the label on their sixth studio album, EVERYONE’S A STAR! (out Nov. 14) — just not in the way you might think.
When they broke through more than a decade ago, 5SOS were, in their own estimation, not a boy band. Back then, they were teenagers opening stadium shows for One Direction, with wardrobes consisting almost solely of band tees and black skinny jeans. The four-piece were dead set on proving they really were a pop-punk band. Their first two albums, 2014’s 5 Seconds of Summer and 2015’s Sounds Good Feels Good, reflected the growing pains of coming of age and being misunderstood. They wrote love songs and wrapped flirty teenage nonsense in perfect pop hooks, like on “She Looks So Perfect” and “End Up Here,” for an audience of primarily young women who lived for it — and them. It wasn’t too far off from the boy-band blueprint, except their songs were backed with live instruments they played themselves.
“We had these very clear characters, you could pick us out from a shadow or draw a caricature of us very easily,” frontman Luke Hemmings says of the band’s early career. “I wanted some of that again. What does that look like now?” In recent years, 5SOS have chronicled their deepest anxieties and formative relationships on introspective, supercharged pop-rock records. It started with Youngblood, the 2018 album where they came to the realization that pop is what they’ve actually been best at all along — with the six-times-platinum single “Youngblood” to prove it — and continued with industrial grit on CALM in 2020, followed by the pristine and arena-ready 5SOS5 in 2022.
In 2023, the band celebrated the full scope of this evolution with the 5 Seconds of Summer Show, an extensive 10th-anniversary tour that included sold-out stops at NYC’s Madison Square Garden and the Forum in L.A. Their set featured elaborate skits, mock infomercials, and comically large, confetti-blasting condiment bottles. They revived songs they hadn’t performed in years, including the ultimate boy-band-coded 5SOS single and “pick me” final boss “Heartbreak Girl.” The run reminded them of the carefree, larger-than-life versions of themselves they discovered when they first started out and had nothing to lose other than their pop-punk street cred.
On EVERYONE’S A STAR!, they explore what it would be like to feel that self-assured, exhilarated, and unrestrained all of the time. “I wanted to evolve the tongue-in-cheek thing that you hear on the first record,” drummer Ashton Irwin says. The song that set the album in motion, “No.1 Obsession,” unlocked the “reckless abandon” of their youth, Hemmings explains. “We wrote as teenage boys and ended up having some crazy lyrics, but with 15 years of wisdom and taste under the belt.” There are no one-liners about American Apparel underwear or their therapists being kinda hot, as there were early in their career; but there are sharp interrogations of parasocial relationships, what bassist Calum Hood calls “constructs of the human condition in the digital age,” and the often expendable nature of pop stardom.
Within a few hours of the “Your Favorite Boy Band Is Coming Back” ads going up, most were thoroughly dismantled, having been ripped down, covered up, or claimed by eager fans. 5SOS didn’t intend for their marketing material to become so meta, but the irony isn’t lost on them. The boy-band posters got a sort of boy-band-industry treatment. “Being in the pop world in a band, or a boy band, you attach your self-worth to how many people are looking at you, and how people feel about you as a person, as a musician,” Hemmings says. “You sort of don’t know who you are without whatever that is, and you can feel disposable.”
This is the other side of EVERYONE’S A STAR!. In magnifying their most high-spirited traits, 5SOS also intensified the tension, unease, and anxieties that built up beneath the surface. “It’s so fun to write about the weirdness of our experience, but also the Frankenstein perception of what a boy band is [and] the emasculation of it,” Irwin says. “Calling grown men a boy band is almost like pointing at a 30-year-old and telling them they’re in high school — it kind of feels humiliating. It’s nice to bark back at that concept.”
5SOS threw everything at the wall and, guitarist Michael Clifford says, thought: “Let’s make it look fucking ridiculous.” They say they pulled inspiration from extravagant Y2K aesthetics in the visuals — gnarly frosted tips, retro punk fashion, and an overload of colors — and leaned further into irony and satire in their songwriting. “Being in this long enough, and knowing our fan base long enough, we can talk about the ups and downs of not just ourselves as humans, but the course of our career,” Clifford says. “The part that I’m enjoying the most about it is touching on the irony of our real-life story, sort of exaggerated heavily into this fictional world that we can kind of create with the way that it looks and sounds.”
They sink their teeth in deep on “NOT OK,” the album’s thunderous lead single, out today. The relentlessly pulsating tempo of the record is tailor-made for the most full-throttle parts of 5SOS’ live show. “Inside every one of us, a shadow side/I call it my better side/I call it the ‘Call me up if you wanna feel better’ side,” Hemmings sings with sharp distortion piercing his tone. “I’ll put on my suit and tie/To emphasize/You and I together double homicide.” Irwin describes the song as an ode to their shared connection with their fans. “We can kill our depression together, and we can experience these elevated feelings together,” he says. “You want people feeling free.”
It’s similar to the connection the bandmates share when they aren’t onstage. The foundation of their friendship makes it easier for them to share their darker and more vulnerable sides with one another without judgement. “When you hit rock bottom, you need a best friend to shake off the pessimism,” Irwin says. “Friends that I call when I’m like, ‘Man, it’s all not going the way I’d hoped. I just need to go out tonight.’” He notes that Hood fills that role for him, a figure present in the hazy memories of nights like the one that unravels in “NOT OK.”
“I was picturing myself absolutely hammered on the way back home in an Uber, and I was thinking about all the dumb shit you say if you get drunk,” Irwin adds. The bridge recalls “some situation where I had said some stupid shit that I didn’t actually mean to somebody,” he says. On the record, he stammers out, “I said I loved you, but I didn’t really mean it, I don’t think.” The person he was talking to might judge him, but his friends won’t. “Ashton’s probably been my best friend for 15 years,” he says. “These guys are my friends not because we’re in a band, we’re in a band because we’re so close. It makes me want to work on those relationships more.”
In the album-making process, they’re protective of one another’s emotions. Hood describes the crescendoing ballad “Ghost” as “a very personal story” to Hemmings. “It’s him pouring his heart out,” he says. “It gives a piece of his soul to the band, and you have to be cognizant of when band members are showing their heart on their sleeve.” Other decisions were more cerebral. They decided on the EVERYONE’S A STAR! album cover, for example, with an iMessage poll in their group chat.
It’s been a while since 5SOS have had to take outside perspectives into consideration. This year, the band inked a recording deal with Republic Records, their first with a major label since parting ways with Interscope in 2021. “Taking a step away from that major-label system was necessary for us at the time to understand how we wanted to create,” Clifford says. “We wanted to do it our way, and we wanted to not have the pressure of anybody else’s opinions.” Releasing 5SOS5 through the indie conglomerate BMG in 2022 “helped us approach this one with a newfound confidence,” he adds. “We know we’re capable of creating something great on our own now, not only within the band, but all of us individually as well.”
When 5SOS posted a TikTok of the band together in early September, pop-culture accounts like Pop Crave rushed to announce that they had “reunited.” In the clip, the band stood awkwardly on a street in New York with the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” set as the audio, seemingly completely oblivious to the news. They didn’t know they’d ever broken up. “I almost [responded], ‘Let’s talk about it, let’s acknowledge that misconception,’” Clifford says. “But I was like, ‘Man, that’s pretty funny.’”
The breakup speculation could have something to do with their four solo projects that arrived in the past year and a half. In 2024, Hemmings and Irwin both released their respective second studio albums, Boy and Blood on the Drums. This year, Hood made his solo debut with Order Chaos Order in June, and Clifford followed with Sidequest in July. The latter arrived so closely together because EVERYONE’S A STAR! would soon require their full attention. It had already been in the works for around two years. “Working with the guys gives me a purpose to keep creating for reasons bigger than my ego,” Hood says. It also emphasizes the roles they each excel in.
5SOS executive-produced EVERYONE’S A STAR!, with Clifford stepping away from the central production role he assumed on 5SOS5. “[It] allowed me to be like, ‘Dude, I love the part that makes a mistake,’” he says. “If I was [leading production on that], I’d be like, ‘There’s a mistake. We’ve got to change it.’” Those are the best parts of the record: the moments that feel disjointed, or plainly put, quite bizarre. “I’m Scared I’ll Never Sleep Again,” a soaring arena-rock track that alternates between three distinct melodic patterns, precedes “I Still Feel the Same,” which puts Youngblood’s “If Walls Could Talk” on synth steroids. “The Rocks” returns the band to their roots by way of power pop with the texture of a garage set.
“I can say this now because I know the music is great, but there was a time where we were just finding the sound, where it was really intimidating,” Hood says. “No one really knew what it was or where it was going, or how to incorporate the soul of the band while progressing forward.” Irwin isn’t too concerned about whether where they landed will immediately click. “We either celebrate that when it’s received well, or at least six albums in, we know we died trying to reinvent what we are,” he says. “I’d rather go out that way than just go back to making stale pop-punk records.”
If the premise of EVERYONE’S A STAR! was to lean into dramatic character traits, the music needed to match. 5SOS reunited with producer Jason Evigan, who helmed “Bad Omens,” a standout from 5SOS5. His work with Rüfüs Du Sol spoke to the band’s interest in marrying their electronic influences, like the Prodigy and Fatboy Slim, with their rock influences, like Queens of the Stone Age and Muse. Hood credits Evigan with teaching them “to be a little more selective” in their instrumental arrangements, adding, “The bass is actually more involved melodically than it has been over the last five records, which I’m stoked about.”
The band also called in hitmakers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan, once core collaborators for One Direction and more recently Sabrina Carpenter. “Those guys have seen the band since our genesis, when we were on tour with One D,” Hemmings says. “They were like, ‘You guys are really funny, we want to hear that from you.’” The influence 5SOS drew from N.E.R.D., No Doubt, and Gorillaz appeared rhythmically, but also helped revive that comedic edge. “We’re fucking funny, and we spend most of our time making jokes and being in a bit,” Hemmings adds. “These songs feel more like talking to the audience and bringing them in on the joke.”
Earlier in their career, they would keep running inside jokes going with fans on social media. These days, they aren’t online much anymore. “Mentally and emotionally, I wanted to be closer with our fans for a longer time in terms of the back and forth online on the daily,” Irwin says. “But the evolution of the conversation online over the past 15 years has been really difficult to navigate.… I think it hurts my development a little bit when I look for approval from people all the time.” When they were teenagers, it was difficult enough, but it was also all they knew. Having their privacy violated, like when their home addresses and private messages would leak, was just what came with being the hot new boy band.
“From the start of the band, it was just part of it, and I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal,” Hemmings says. “When friends and family are around it, something will happen and they’ll be like, ‘What the fuck was that? Like, that was so odd.’ And then you go, ‘Oh, I guess it is.’” He realized he needed space from it as he got older and it started impacting his personal relationships — Hemmings and Clifford are both married with children now, which requires the strictest of boundaries — and his self-perception. “People romanticize and sexualize a younger version of yourself,” he says, “and you start to get these insecurities of ‘Oh, I don’t look like that anymore.’”
It can feel suffocating as adults, but they have better means of managing it now. Still, the idea of other young artists facing the same struggles and scrutiny is chilling to them. “I heard about that new boy-band show and it just made me terrified,” Irwin says, referring to Netflix’s Building the Band. “I just get the fucking shivers. It scares the shit out of me.” The first episode of the competition series opens with an emotional tribute to Liam Payne; the One Direction member served as a judge on the show prior to his death in October 2024. At the time, 5SOS shared a statement remembering the singer they spent three years on tour with at the height of their breakthrough. “There was always a bright light in you,” they wrote. “We are so devastated that this world put that light out.”
“It’s impossible not to get affected by it,” Hemmings says of Payne’s death. “All that anger and frustration, and sadness and grief, definitely plays a part in it.” These emotions surfaced in a particularly distinct way on “Boyband,” which originated as a much darker song than the mischievous final product. “It started from this dark but funny place, like getting called a boy band and having those egotistical feelings,” he adds. “I don’t know anyone else that could put out that song. It’s like, [singing] ‘Backstreet’s back, alright!’”
The band’s understanding of what it means to go through the ringer of pop stardom is amplified not just by its own experiences, but through the front-row seat 5SOS had to One Direction’s explosive trajectory during the years they spent on tour together and the waves of artists that followed.
“We’ve seen so many weird music-industry experiences with these young boys and men who get into these situations, and it just leaves them in these bad deals that leave them disenfranchised when making music,” Irwin says. “You’d be surprised how many people in my life say, ‘How are you OK?’ It’s weird when people say that because it’s like there’s a general knowing of how difficult it is.” The answer to that question is embedded throughout the DNA of EVERYONE’S A STAR!, though the drummer sums it up succinctly: “We made a childhood promise to each other to take it this far.”
They have plans to take it even further, with goals of bringing their finely tuned live shows to stadiums at some point. “There needs to be a part of you that can see it — that can see you playing those huge shows, that can see this album being a huge success,” Hood says. “Your mindset needs to be there. You don’t really want to be surprised by it. You want to be planning for it, for sure. But there’s also a part of you where it’s like, ‘Reality is not fully up to you.’”
All they can do is continue to show up. “It’s really hard to make music, and it’s really easy to stop making music,” Clifford says. But when it comes to 5SOS, Irwin notes, “Nothing ever comes easy to us.”
