Not many bands have had as big of a chokehold on pop music in recent years as Sydney’s 5 Seconds of Summer, with long-lasting hits like ‘Youngblood’ and ‘She Looks So Perfect’.
On this day in 2014, they released their self-titled debut album, immediately catapulting them into mainstream stardom.
Since then, they’ve released four other albums, with their most recent, 5SOS5 in 2022. They became the first Australian act to achieve three No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 album chart, and the first band (not vocal group) to have their first three full-length albums debut at the top, marking them as one of Australia’s most successful pop exports ever.
The band assembled around 2011 when members Calum Hood, Luke Hemmings, and Michael Clifford all attended the same high school (they later invited drummer Ashton Irwin into the band), and started out by making YouTube covers together. 5 Seconds of Summer was led by the single ‘She Looks So Perfect’, which immediately shot to #1 in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK, later becoming a Platinum Certified record.
At the time, 5 Seconds of Summer was highly praised for having a lot of rock aspects in the music. While they were declared a boyband (something that members have refuted in the past), fans and critics could tell that the band were influenced by rock music and wanted to incorporate the sound into their radio-friendly hits, which made their music more appealing and far less generic. It mad their music fresher than a lot of their competitors, at the time their English counterparts One Direction were intent on world domination.
5 Seconds of Summer made history, cementing the band as pop mainstays and radio regulars. The album debuted at #1 in the US, amassing an extremely impressive 259,000 units sold in its first week, marking 5 Seconds of Summer as the biggest first-week performance for a debut album since Daughtry’s self-titled debut in 2006.
With 5 Seconds of Summer, they became the first Australian act to ever go #1 from a debut album. Since its release, 5SOS went #1 in 14 countries, Platinum in four, and Gold in ten. Not bad for a group of lads from Sydney!
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10 years on, 5 Seconds of Summer are still as busy as ever. Last year, their ‘The 5 Seconds of Summer Show’ took them around the world on yet another tour, and this year they featured on “Lighter” alongside David Guetta and Galantis.
It almost feels too early to be reminiscing on 5 Seconds of Summer’s debut album. To see it’s been ten years since its release is almost a shock, given the pull they still have globally and their continued radio success.
