Following a few weeks on from Adelaide-bred songwriter-to-the-stars Sia storming into #1 on the US Album Charts, another Australian act has debuted atop the Billboard 200 – with some record-breaking results.
The four members of West Sydney pop punks 5 Seconds Of Summer may have only formed at high school three years ago but they have managed to crack a coveted US #1 with their first full-length album.
The quartet’s self-titled LP shifted 259,000 units in its first week of release, according to Billboard and Neilsen Soundscan, making 5 Seconds Of Summer the third largest debut of 2014 so far (behind Coldplay’s Ghost Stories selling 383,000 copies and Erich Church’s The Outsiders‘ own 288,000 units).
They’re also the highest sales for a new artist debut this year and the largest debut numbers for any act in nearly eight years (since Daughtry’s own eponymous LP in November, 2006 to be precise).
But the achievements garnered by the chart-busting teens doesn’t step there, earning them unprecedented homegrown success.
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5 Seconds of Summer not only join an exclusive club of Aussie artists who’ve hit #1 in the US – alongside INXS, Savage Garden, Gotye, Men At Work, Olivia Newton John, and most recently Iggy Azalea and Sia – but are the first members of their own unprecedented league; they’re the first Australian act to debut at #1 in the US with its first album. It’s also the biggest debut by an Australian since SoundScan began tracking chart data back in 1991.
According to News Ltd, the album has shifted over 1.5 million copies worldwide, hitting #1 here in Australia as well topping the charts in New Zealand, Canada, Italy, Holland, and Mexico – but pipped to the post in the UK (kept off the top spot by the ‘Most Powerful Figure In Black & Urban Music’, Ed Sheeran).
The band of teen heartthrobs – guitarists Michael Clifford and Luke Hemmings, bassist Callum Hood, and drummer Ashton Irwin (all aged under 20) – have been on track for a major US album debut ever since the chart success of ‘She Looks So Perfect’. Earlier this year, their breakout single and EP of the same name peaked at #2 on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 143,000.
‘She Looks So Perfect’ was also recently named the most played Australian song on commercial radio Down Under (and seventh overall) while tickets for the pop punks’ homecoming dates in Sydney and Melbourne last month disappearing within half an hour.
The 5 Seconds Of Summer juggernaut shows no signs of slowing either, they’re set to open for (celebrity mates) One Direction on their current word tour and are releasing a new single/EP combination for their track ‘Amnesia’ on Friday 5th September.
It might be tempting to dismiss 5 Seconds Of Summer’s success as being down to the buying power of the teenage market (they’ve singlehandedly helped boost underwear sales, after all), and nobody’s rushing to compare 5 Seconds Of Summer’s credibility over the grassroots success of other Aussies making waves in the US or UK, but the numbers don’t lie.
Even in a landscape where album sales are at an all-time low, the four Aussie pop punks have a commercial climax that has surpassed most of their promising Aussie ambassadors in one fell swoop, which is more than enough reason to put them in the same calibre of homegrown talent that are making a big splash across the globe.
