Our special guest on the first-ever episode of the Rolling Stone Uncut podcast is none other than Australian heavyweights, 5 Seconds of Summer!
The Sydney group were recently in town to promote their sixth studio album out today, Everyone’s a Star!, and spoke with Editor-in-Chief Neil Griffiths all about the new record, the change in direction of the new music, and embracing the boy band tag in their own way after 15 years.
Watch or listen to the full episode below.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ: It’s been a little over three years since 5SOS5 and a few of you have released solo records in that time? When did the conversation about new 5SOS music start within the band?
Ashton Irwin: It started in 2023, I think, or late 2022. We wrote this song called “No. 1 Obsession” which kind of kicked us in the ass, and it was sonically interesting, lyrically interesting, and we started to share it amongst each other and it, and it kind of kindled, the beginnings of Everyone’s a Star!. We fought for this one for a few years, actually. It was a, a pretty long process for us, but it worked out perfectly though. We needed to just focus on what we’re gonna release and, and how we’re gonna approach 5 Seconds of Summer, ’cause we have such a rare precious thing with this group and we didn’t want to rush anything, and we also wanted everybody to express themselves with the solo records.
This album has so many inspirations from bands and artists that you typically wouldn’t expect from 5SOS – The Prodigy, Gorillaz.
Michael Clifford: We took so many different inspirations from so many different eras of shit to put together… being able to do it and it feeling fresh – it’s always gotta be fun and exciting and uncomfortable a little bit. I think in order to just continue to wanna do it, you know? Because we’re just not the type of band who makes the same song over and over again, or wants to.
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With this album, you’ve embraced the boy band tag that has followed you since you began. Is that a gentle FU to the haters?
Irwin: Well, that’s punk, isn’t it? It’s more just thank you for such a sharp tool. Pop is a conversation with society, to us. The things you call us, we can turn them into firepower, creatively. And that’s really a bit of a breakthrough psychologically for us. Call us more things, we’ll just make a pop song out of it and utilise that conversation.
When people would call us a boy band when we were younger, it was almost to emasculate us and make us feel smaller than we were and to belittle our dreams as musicians. It was nasty, but we weren’t intellectualising it enough to use it as a mirror… it was a bit of a breakthrough when we did that on this album and and actually just accepted it fully.
How would you describe this chapter for the band?
Luke Hemmings: I think it feels, like Ashton was saying, the amalgamation of five albums of work and songwriting and working on it, and I think being able to step out of the band for a second and look at it from afar and be like, ‘OK, if I was a fan of this band, what would I want to hear and what would be exciting to me and how do we rebuild the individual characters of the band?’
Being able to look back at our first album and all of that, people really liked the individual characters and how do we make them all shine, you know? It feels like we’ve reached this staple 5 Seconds of Summer album, which is so crazy six albums in. That’s the thing that I’m most proud of. It’s 15 years of friendship and it’s crazy that we’re just still swinging!
It’s weird at this point in our career. It’s like pulling a big rock up a hill for three years to get an album over the line. It takes a piece of you to get it over the line and to put on a great show and make it all come to life. The bar has been set so high. I know we all want to be here because it’s hard to get.
