5 Seconds of Summer (5SOS), a pop-rock group of 14 years, addresses the stereotypes, expectations and quandaries of belonging to a boyband in their deluxe studio album “Everyone’s A Star! (Fully Evolved)” released on Nov 17.
A rowdy production style, cynical turns of phrases, self-aware comments and heavy use of repetition meld into an unhinged sarcasm that mocks the parameters of the pop-rock boyband image they shed in prior albums, such as “5SOS5” and “Youngblood.”
In the title track “Everyone’s a Star!,” they address the absolute numbing that fame renders on public figures. Imagery such as “Livin’ in the glitter” put next to “baby, I don’t feel a thing” disorients the listener into a questioning of the senses. The narrator not only struggles to see what’s right in front of them but also strains to maintain a capacity for emotion, as vision informs emotion. 5SOS elaborates, “Everythin’ is better when I don’t know what it means,” referencing themes of plausible deniability and drug usage. Less ambiguous, but just as existential, is the confession, “Eating gum for dinner and I’m smilin’ through my teeth.” Listeners may gather a suspension of self-care by the band that is alright as long as an appearance of enjoyment sustains itself to the public eye.
In “NOT OK,” 5SOS reveals what hides behind such a facade. In the first verse, lead singer Luke Hemmings insists that “inside every one of us” is “a shadow side” and implies how he teases out that shadow through cocaine in “Lucifer in every line, every night.” Continuing this description of deviance, he answers his own rhetorical question, “Where did the good boy go?” with “Killed by desire.” Finally, he concludes in simple terms, “I like the darker side of me.”
Extending past the self, “Telephone Busy” addresses the toxic dynamics in co-dependent relationships, a theme par for the course with 5SOS. Matter-of-fact lines like “I smoke, I drink til you come ‘round” and “Big heart that I tore apart / This one’s gonna leave a scar” suggest accountability, while the flat tone in the following lyrics “Call you but your telephone busy / I been thinking, do you miss me?” indicates no desire to change these needy habits.
In “Boyband,” 5SOS explicates its interpretation of the parasocial relationships that fans have with it. In a series of imperatives, the group ironically describes how fans may treat the members as something disposable, but delicious, to greedily consume. If “Take my photograph and lick it with a wet tongue” wasn’t clear enough, Hemmings adds, “Make me the flavor of the week.” The commands reference the band’s co-dependence with fame, as corroborated by “Now I only feel alive when you’re looking at me.” However, the tone just as well presupposes the fans’ capacity to objectify the group members and works to call out their fanaticism, rather than to encourage it.
Worship and disinterest, the opposite ends of a fandom spectrum, meet a middle ground in “Love me when I’m skinny and we never, ever age.” The line harkens back to the lyrics “The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap / We’ll all stay skinny ‘cause we just won’t eat” from the classic “Rockstar” by Nickelback. Extrapolating from the long-established image of a rockstar’s life, 5SOS recognizes that a fan’s interest and passion depends on continuing to meet sanctioned standards in behavior, attractiveness, and youth. Within these cages, they are left to deal with the “Same four chords, but it never feels the same.”
Following this theme of change, 5SOS turns its acknowledgement of unhealthy behavior back to the group in a reflective track called “Evolve.” In a self-depricating fashion, bassist and vocalist Calum Hood refers to himself as an “emotional junkie,” and drummer Ashton Fletcher calls himself “a lowlife” with “freak energy.” Together, Calum and Luke add “freak energy” to their self-descriptions. Hood begs plainly, “I know you can make me / A man from a monkey” — with a repeating supplication: “Wait for me.” The rest of the band support his request with a self-aware “To lo-lo-lo-lo-love you, I got to evolve.” Punctuating this message is an interlude that robotically lectures, “girls are more ready to learn earlier than boys.”
Their first bonus track, called “The Rocks,” opens with a sinister sound painting a picture of anger and self-isolation. The hook touches on a theme of insomnia through “Keep waking up at 3 a.m. / I face regrets and plan revenge,” which parallels “Can’t kick my way up out of the ditch / Can’t kill my mind, it’s at it again.” Despite the aggression, the song balances itself through vulnerability in “I search the world for somebody else / ‘cause I can’t take, take this feeling alone.”
Another of their bonus tracks, “Wishful Dreaming,” describes a couple who keeps their “bodies under covers” and their “heads up in the sky. The “romantic disillusion” just ends up in them “sleepwalking through the motions” in an effort to disregard any positive agency in their relationship, all for the sake of maintaining “a blissful feeling” that will inevitably disappear.
Similarly, the bonus track “Chest” paints a portrait of two inseparable people. The chorus, “I found my heart inside your chest / I thought the love inside was dead,” is a new rendition of the cliche of two people who belong together. However, the romance in the idea dissipates through co-dependent images like “We shared a cigarette while we were getting dressed,” a depiction of a pair who not only feel compelled to do everything together, but also supplement their time together with drugs. The self-destructive nature of this relationship asserts itself again in a reckless “keep lovin’ me to death.”
Following these themes of romanticization and suffocating solitude, the 5SOS members convert themselves into caricatures in “Everyone’s A Star! (Fully Evolved),” even making their album cover a photo of them as bobbleheads. They are, metaphorically, commodities to be bought and sold, viewed and played with, designed and re-distributed. Throughout the album’s constant acknowledgments of the band’s subjugation to fan culture and the music industry, 5SOS utilizes humor to mock, and therefore reject, both institutions. After all, the only people who can sell, present and offer 5 Seconds of Summer to the masses are the 5 Seconds of Summer members themselves.
Carmen Lin is an Arts & Entertainment Intern for the fall 2025 quarter. She can be reached at carmnml@uci.edu.
Edited by Joshua Gonzales