Australia's
5 Seconds of Summer
deliver a bombastically fun, knowingly self-aware cybercore dance album with 2025's
EVERYONE'S A STAR!
. Arriving three years after the eponymously titled
5SOS
, the band's sixth album also comes on the heels of singer
Luke Hemmings
, guitarist
Michael Clifford
, bassist
Calum Hood
, and drummer
Ashton Irwin
each having released their own solo projects. Consequently, there's a sense that with everybody having had the chance to do their own serious thing, they were able to reunite in the spirit of brotherly collaboration.
has a fresh, experimental quality as if the band had a giddy time exploring the blend of '90s electronic and 2000s club sounds that make up much of the album. Helping them achieve their hyper-fluorescent Y2K vibe were producers
Jason Evigan
,
Julian Bunetta
, and
John Ryan
, who teamed with the band in Nashville for the sessions. Here, the band frame their vocals in sky blue synths, wiry industrial guitars, and whip-cracking trance beats. Cuts like the opening title track and "NOT OK" have a frenetic, '90s big beat quality, like a heretofore unimagined FIFA World Cup anthem collaboration between
the Chemical Brothers
and
Boyzone
. Yet more evocative moments pop up throughout, including the 2000s,
Exciter
-era
Depeche Mode
stylism of "No. 1 Obsession," the '80s post-punk romance of "I Feel the Same," and the saucy, falsetto-tinged synth-funk dynamism of "Evolve." As exuberantly hooky as those tracks are, the album truly coalesces around "Boyband," a grinding dance number in which
Hemmings
and his bandmates manage to both eviscerate and celebrate their teen idol past with a wry, cutting humor, singing "Raised on pop punk and bubblegum/Stay young, love me til I get it wrong/Make me the flavour of the week/Now I only feel alive when you're looking at me." That the song ends with an outro where you hear the band laughing and saying, "I had to admit, it was really f&*king awesome!," speaks to the wry sense of playfulness they achieve throughout
. While that self-aware sense of irony underpins much of the album, there's a heartfelt emotion coming through the pulsing grooves, as on the yearning "I'll Never Sleep Again" and the buoyantly romantic album-closing love letter "Jawbreaker." What's particularly compelling is just how confidently
incorporate these vintage-inspired aesthetics into their own sound. Part of this is that they long succeeded in maturing beyond their punky teen pop years several albums ago, embracing a diverse array of sounds. With
, they look back at their early years with an artful honesty, crafting a post-modern boy band album that's as sonically and thematically ambitious as it is fun. ~ Matt Collar