Luke Hemmings was an anxious 15-year-old in 2011 when he played his first gig as the lead singer of what would soon become one of the biggest boy bands on the planet. Just three years later, 5 Seconds of Summer released their debut self-titled studio album, effectively launching Hemmings and his bandmates into the stratosphere of pop-rock stardom. Lead single “She Looks So Perfect,” with its euphoric pop-punk hook and summery guitar chords, solidified the then-babyfaced band as teen heartthrobs — a label they’ve long been associated with even as they’ve moved squarely into adulthood.
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In fact, it wasn’t until recently that Hemmings, now 27, felt the existential pangs of his youth beginning to slip away from him. When the realization hit, it hit hard. “Watching the numbers [on your age] tick up, getting older, you start thinking about different things,” Hemmings tells Alternative Press. “You start thinking about creating a life for yourself. You start thinking about having a family and trying to get to a point where you’re comfortable in your own skin. It’s something that takes time. And even when you think you’re there, in a few years you’ll look back and go, ‘Man, I thought I had it all figured out at that age, but I didn’t know anything back then.’”
Grappling with the inevitability of growing older was the perfect creative catalyst for Hemmings’ new EP, the simply and aptly titled boy. The EP opens with “I’m Still Your Boy,” a twinkling, dreamy ode to regret and that ever-persistent longing to recapture moments lost. The song would sound perfectly at home on the soundtrack to a 2000s indie coming-of-age film, but in truth, so would most of the tracks on the EP. Melancholic lead single “Shakes,” with its sparkling, electric guitar riffs and slow, swirling vocals, is a pensive love song Hemmings wrote during a gloomy evening in New York City. As the song progresses, its languid sonic drizzle builds into a cathartic downpour. Elsewhere, on “Close My Eyes,” Hemmings ponders the complexities of growing up (“Where is the time I lost?”) over a driving synth-pop soundscape.
“The way I write my solo stuff, and particularly for boy, is like looking back at memories. When you look back on things, it doesn’t always come back to you exactly how it happened. It’s not a clear picture — it’s sort of a blurry mess,” Hemmings explains of his ruminative writing process, which he likens to “ripping up the pages of a diary and putting different stories and memories with each other.”
Hemmings says he was feeling a bit “hopeless, emotionally lost, and yearning to go home” when he worked on the EP, which was written largely on planes and in lonely hotel rooms. He’s been in transit for nearly two decades now — the greater part of his life, to put it in perspective — traveling around the world for gigs and awards shows, bouncing in and out of hotels, wandering foreign cities, messily scribbling potential lyrics down on paper napkins along the way.
“I’ve been traveling from such a young age. I feel really lucky to have been able to experience other cultures and so many people who speak different languages; to be around all these different life influences. I think that’s really shaped who I am as a person,” he says. Still, being constantly on the move has taken a toll: “Your life is up in the air for so many years, and you’re not in one place for such a long time. You don’t have that stability. I think at this point in my life, I was aching for that. I yearn for it a bit more when I’m away, and now it’s harder to leave.”
Sonically, boy was inspired by New York City’s early 2000s post-punk revival scene, including the Strokes, the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and Julian Casablancas’ solo work, as well as the emotional musicality of acts such as the Verve and Cocteau Twins. At the same time he was working on the EP, Hemmings immersed himself in films steeped in themes of alienation, introspection, and cultural disorientation, such as Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. The latter 2003 comedy-drama explicitly inspired the dreamlike Bogotá-set music video for “Shakes.” “One day you can be in a city, walking around on your own, and feel like, ‘Wow, this is so beautiful.’ But if you look through a different lens, you might go, ‘Oh, I’m so lonely, and there’s so many people living all these lives, and it’s kind of existential and overwhelming,’” the singer shares.
It’s a much different perspective than when Hemmings first made the solo leap in 2021. Galvanized by his isolation at home at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Hemmings had nowhere to turn but inward. This solitude and subsequent artistic autonomy resulted in When Facing the Things We Turn Away From, an album that chronicled and reflected on a surreal decade spent in a massively successful, world-touring band. The project pushed Hemmings out of his comfort zone and marked the beginning of a series of major life moments, from going on his first-ever solo tour to getting married to his longtime partner, Sierra Deaton. “She’s a good sounding board because she’s got a good gauge on what’s cool,” Hemmings gushes of his singer-songwriter wife, who can be heard harmonizing with her husband on tender boy track “Close Enough to Feel You.”
Branching out as a solo artist has been a much different — and differently challenging — process than his work in 5SOS. “This process, for me, is just a bit more insular. It’s a soul search. It’s trying to dissect my life, just from my perspective,” Hemmings explains. “When you’re working with the band, people have their individual stories, obviously, and some shine through more than others on different occasions. Someone will throw a line in, from a different perspective, and it becomes this collective story.”
The solo project started as a challenge of “trying to figure out if I could write on my own, because I write a bit more all over the place, and I’m not very good at finishing things,” the multitalented musician admits. “Not having that safety net of other people you’ve known your whole life and written with for years… We know each other like the back of our hands, and I can always take songs for the band to Ashton [Irwin] or Calum [Hood] or Michael [Clifford] for their input. But you can become reliant on other people to help you finish songs when you’re not writing on your own.”
Currently, 5SOS are taking a much-needed breather to focus on their growing families, personal lives, and creative projects outside of the band. The break started roughly after they wrapped their extensive 5 Seconds of Summer Show world tour at the end of 2023. “The main thing is just talking beforehand and explaining why you want to do certain things [outside of the band], even if it’s not making solo stuff; even if it’s just, ‘I need a bit of time,’” Hemmings says. “We all know how much hard work was put in from such a young age, and we know we’ve got such a cool, unique, beautiful thing in the band. So even though we have these outside things, whether it’s having a family, making solo things, or having other artistic endeavors, the band is a home.”
The “love is still there” during their downtime, though, Hemmings says, adding that he, Irwin, Hood, and Clifford remain each others’ biggest cheerleaders even offstage and outside of the studio. “We text each other and call each other. There’s still a conversation happening even when we’re not making stuff. I think it’s important to be friends outside of work, and we just want each other to be happy,” he says, mentioning that 5SOS fans need not worry about his or his bandmates’ various solo projects — as self-fulfilling as they are — getting in the way of the band. “The band started when I was so young. I love making music with them, and I can’t wait to make another 5SOS album. It’s been such an anchor in my life; it’s part of who I am and in my DNA.”
Thirteen years after his 5SOS debut, Hemmings looks back at the whirlwind of success and fame that interrupted his youth with a complex, very human mix of sentimentality and gratitude. “When I look back, the positives obviously outweigh all the negatives, and I don’t really speak about the negatives too much. It definitely wasn’t normal, so I feel really lucky that I have a great family and that I went through it all with real, proper friends. I feel blessed that through all of that madness, we have remained mates and can talk through stuff and directly relate to each other. To go through that on my own would have been potentially not survivable, because it was so much noise, and so much was given away at such a young age,” he muses, reflecting on how reserved and shy he was at the time. “To have that amount of eyes on your childhood definitely shaped some views of myself, but I just feel really stoked that we kept at it, even though it’s strange to look back on.”
Strange indeed as it was for a teen who grew up in the middle-of-nowhere suburbs of eastern Australia, Hemmings has absolutely no regrets about his remarkable boyhood. When asked what he might tell his 15-year-old self if he could send a message back in time, he pauses for a moment and jokes, “Maybe get better at fashion?” Then, he gets philosophical: “I don’t know what I’d say. I don’t know if I’d say anything at all. I think you’ve just gotta figure it out for yourself. There probably wouldn’t be a bunch of stuff I would do differently. I’d love to just be of the mindset that everything happened the way it was supposed to.”
Photos by Silken Weinberg
Styling by Justine Logue
Makeup by Fitch Lunar
