Though it has been a while since my favorite Ozzie boys have released new music, there are still so many songs of theirs that satiate my need for 5SOS tunes. 5 Seconds of Summer, pop-rock/pop-punk (boy)band from Australia, are most known for their songs Amnesia, She Looks So Perfect (AKA the American Apparel Underwear Song), and She’s Kinda Hot. These are all jams in their own right, but the band has so much more to offer than their singles (and their studio versions of songs).
They have stories to tell and talent to be admired. Formed in 2011, the boys left home to further pursue music when their youngest band member (Luke Hemmings) was 16, and they’d already been on a handful of tours around their homeland by that point. They joined One Direction on their worldwide Take Me Home Tour just a few months after they moved to London, and the rest is basically history.
Michael Clifford, Calum Hood, Luke Hemmings, and Ashton Irwin form a quartet of talented musicians who write their own music, and have been doing so together from the age of 15-17 (depending on the band member). 5 Seconds of Summer have two albums and eight EP’s, a record label, have toured (as headliners) more than 10 times, and have won 36 awards so far in their career, and they started out as lanky teenage boys singing covers on YouTube. If that’s not an aspirational goal, I’m not sure what is.
I’ve been following the band for about five years now, and over time I’ve noticed some of their songs go unnoticed, even by fans. Allow me to discuss five 5SOS songs you should reconsider as favorites, or at least listen to for the first time.
1. Outer Space / Carry On
Taking a page out of other non-boyband bands’ books, 5SOS combined two songs into one (seriously, check Green Day’s track lists, it’s a thing). The lyrics in this piece of art will get stuck in your head and you’ll realize that these Aussies are capable of more than pop-rock music, i.e. music that sticks into more of the alt-rock side of things.
The joint song is about reminiscing on the wreckage of a relationship and then about perseverance and optimism, showing a sense of maturity and growth beyond heartbreak. It goes from “I’m still running back to you / If you could love me again” and “Love me like you did / I’ll give you anything” to “You know it’s gonna get better / Say a prayer for the broken bones” and “Carry on, outlast the ignorance / Moving on, survive the innocence.”
2. Lost Boy
I’ll be honest here—this song really isn’t that great in terms of well written lyrics or a complex structure. They didn’t ever release it on an official EP or album, but boy, oh boy, Lost Boy has a big ole chunk of my 5SOS-lovin’ heart. It is the song that I first heard by them that really caught my attention when they opened for One Direction in 2013. I could not get it out of my head for the following weeks.
Lost Boy has been released as a studio version (finally) on Spotify as part of the collection of B-sides and lost tracks called “This Is Everything We Ever Said”, and I listen to it constantly. I love it a lot, and probably will for a long time, because it was the start of an era of 5SOS fandom for me.
3. Invisible
“Who am I when I don’t know myself?” and “I was already missing / Before the night I left” are two lines that stick out to me. Almost everyone can relate to feeling lost, unsure of themselves, and, like the title, invisible to everyone around them. To me, it sheds some light on what the band was like before they became a band, and hints at their own histories of self esteem and mental illness battles.
I don’t know about you, but I enjoy feeling like I can relate to my favorite celebrities.
Bonus about Invisible: the entire thing is sung by Calum Hood, AKA my bae. Swoon worthy, that boy is.
4. Kiss Me Kiss Me
One thing I will say that I think 5SOS does a less than great job of is naming their songs. This song is so much more than its cheesy, boyband-ish, bubblegum pop namesake. It’s about meeting someone that you don’t expect to like as much as you do, and you don’t want to let whatever you have with them go. Even if they took out one of the kiss me’s, it would sound less... immature. For example, “Kiss Me.” Instantly better.
Kiss Me Kiss Me is just the perfect (underrated) 5SOS song to jam out to when starting off a long road trip, hanging out with your friends, working out. When I hear it, I just want to dance, but I hate telling anyone about the song itself because of its awful name.
5. If You Don’t Know
This song is raw, real, and a little bit cryptic, not to mention far from the bubblegum pop reputation haters give 5SOS. When you listen to it, you can listen to a few snippets of a story of some sort of breakup or ending to a relationship of some kind.
“And the names of the songs that made you cry” is such a specific thing. It’s one thing to remember someone’s favorite song, but it’s something else entirely when you remember the songs (PLURAL) that make someone cry, because that’s not first date/first encounter material. You have to know someone really well to know what songs make them cry. It demonstrates an emotionally open relationship.
“And the shirt that I had that you always borrowed / When I woke, it was gone, there was no tomorrow” is more general, but it still sounds so legitimate and real. That’s something that actually happens when couples break up.
There’s the character progression when they first say “go ahead, rip my heart out / Show me what love’s all about” and then change it to “go ahead, rip my heart out / That’s what love’s all about.” The person that the song is about showed the writer what love is (sort of), or at least that’s what they’re saying.
While the rhymes in IYDK are far from advanced—fast, last, past, or say, stay, away, or out, about—I think the fact that this song makes you feel things means a lot more than rhymes that are inconspicuous (there are a few, e.g. tonight, eyes, inside). You feel like you woke up to your significant other gone, and the shirt they loved of yours is gone, too, and you just want to know what it is you could have said to make them stay.
But it also speaks of a slightly toxic relationship. “You would scream, we would fight.” That doesn’t sound much like a happy couple. And the fact that the pre-chorus talks about your significant other ripping your heart out does not sound like a healthy relationship, either. However, I think that the fact that a love so real is gone—even the best, healthiest, most perfect love—would be enough to rip anyone’s heart out.
The song just makes you think and it makes you sad and it makes you vaguely melancholic, too, because it reminds listeners of other loves that ended. Love, before the end, can often be very happy, but as you remember the happy times you remember the way it ended, and then it’s ambivalence.
(Can you tell I really love this one?)
