5 Seconds of Summer

Norwest, YouTube and the One Direction slipstream

5 Seconds of Summer came together in late 2011 around three pupils at Norwest Christian College in Sydney's north-west: Luke Hemmings, Michael Clifford and Calum Hood, who began posting cover videos to YouTube under the name. Ashton Irwin joined on drums that December, and the completed four-piece played its first show at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney on 3 December 2011.

What turned an online following into an international one was a support slot. The band opened for One Direction on the Take Me Home Tour in 2013 and again on the Where We Are Tour in 2014, which put them in front of stadium audiences before they had released an album of their own. Their debut single proper, "She Looks So Perfect", went to number one in four countries in early 2014 and set up a major-label career with Capitol.

The association cut both ways. It handed them an audience, and it also handed them a label — boyband — that they spent most of the following decade arguing with, given that all four played instruments and Irwin sat behind a kit. That argument is the through-line of everything they have done since, and it is now, deliberately, the premise of their stage show.

Five albums, four number ones and a spell on their own

The self-titled debut arrived in 2014 and went straight in at number one on the Billboard 200. Sounds Good Feels Good followed in 2015 and gave them a first UK number one. Youngblood, in 2018, made it three consecutive US number ones, and its title track became the fourth highest-selling Australian single of the 2010–2019 decade. Calm, in 2020, extended their run of Australian number ones to four.

5SOS5, released in 2022, was the break in the pattern: their first album issued independently, through BMG Rights Management, and the record that closed out their first decade. The tour that supported it, The 5 Seconds of Summer Show, ran 42 dates from Buenos Aires on 19 July 2023 to Prague on 12 October 2023 and framed the evening as a late-night variety programme, complete with a curtain reveal, filmed sketches and an inflatable red die lobbed into the crowd so that fans could roll for which deep cut got played. That format is the direct ancestor of the current production.

The gap between albums was filled with solo work rather than silence. Irwin released Superbloom in 2020 and Blood on the Drums in 2024; Hemmings put out When Facing the Things We Turn Away From in 2021 and the boy EP in 2024; Hood and Clifford both released solo albums in 2025. All four strands feed back into the band's sixth record, which treats those separate identities as characters rather than side projects.

Everyone's a Star! — leaning into the insult

Everyone's a Star! was released on 14 November 2025 through Republic Records, a twelve-track album written and recorded in Los Angeles and Nashville with a deep bench of producers including Julian Bunetta, Jason Evigan, Andrew Goldstein, John Ryan, Jake Sinclair, Noah Conrad and Mark Schick. Four singles trailed it: "Not OK" on 24 September 2025, "Boyband" on 16 October, "Telephone Busy" on 23 October and the title track on 21 November.

The band's own account of the record is that they set out to make the opposite of what came before. Clifford has described wanting to make music they had never made before; Hemmings summarised the title as a comment on how cheap fame has become — when everyone is a star, nobody is — and called this version of the group the more yassified one. Clifford has credited the Y2K and early-2000s aesthetic for the visuals, and the band have named N.E.R.D., Gorillaz, Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy among the touchstones, which accounts for the new-wave synths and house-adjacent rhythms sitting next to guitars. "Boyband" began, in their telling, from a dark but funny place, and Hemmings has said the death of One Direction's Liam Payne in October 2024 fed into it.

Critics largely went with it. The album holds 77 out of 100 on Metacritic from five reviews, with scores of 80 from Kerrang!, PopMatters, Clash and AllMusic against 60 from Rolling Stone. AllMusic's Matt Collar wrote that the band look back at their early years with an artful honesty, and the record's quieter moments — "I'm Scared I'll Never Sleep Again", "Ghost" — drew as much comment as its louder ones.

Where they stand in October 2026

The album entered at number one in Australia, Austria, the Netherlands, Scotland and the United Kingdom, and at number six on the Billboard 200. On the UK chart dated 21 November 2025 it became their fourth British number one, after Sounds Good Feels Good, Calm and 5SOS5, and also topped the Official Record Store Chart as the week's biggest seller in independent shops. The same week delivered the statistic the band will be quoting for years: with Everyone's a Star! at number one, they became the first act in ARIA chart history to reach the top with each of their first six studio albums.

The Everyone's a Star! World Tour is the largest thing they have attempted — 98 shows across four legs, opening at the SSE Arena in Belfast on 26 March 2026 and scheduled to close at Indonesia Arena in Jakarta on 6 December. Europe ran from late March into May, North America from late May through August, and a Latin American leg took in Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes on 9 September, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Santiago and Bogotá before finishing at Costa21 in Lima on 27 September.

That leg produced the tour's only cancellation. The Monterrey show on 12 September was called off minutes before the 9pm start when Irwin fell ill; the band said he was receiving medical attention and that playing risked a repeat of an earlier episode, and refunds were issued. Everything since has gone ahead as scheduled.

Next up is Oceania: Spark Arena in Auckland on 24 October, Brisbane's Riverstage on 28 October, Sydney on 30 October, Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on 2 November, Adelaide Entertainment Centre on 4 November and Kings Park in Perth on 6 November, with Cub Sport opening. An Asian run follows through November and into December — Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong — several of those cities holding more than one night after dates were added on demand.

The show as a bit, and the bit as a show

The production takes the boyband argument and stages it as light satire. The Los Angeles show at the Kia Forum on 11 July 2026 opened with mock interviews and a faux-documentary sequence, with the four emerging from a white car parked on stage; the evening is divided into segments, each member gets a solo spot drawn from their own records, and the running gag is the band both insisting on and sending up the claim that they are the best boyband in the world.

Underneath the framing it is a straight arena rock set of roughly 27 songs, and the reviews that have come in from the North American leg suggest it works better than the concept might imply. The Baltimore show at CFG Bank Arena on 7 June 2026 ran close to two hours and was described as equal parts spectacle, satire and a thank-you to a fifteen-year audience, with Irwin leaving the kit for centre stage during "Telephone Busy" and the arena lit by phone torches through "Ghost of You". Writing on the Forum date, Kat Sophia called the performance tight-knit, self-aware and witty, and noted that the band still land the jump in "She Looks So Perfect".

The crowd response is weighted towards the old material — the first notes of "Amnesia", now played acoustically, and the run of "English Love Affair", "Voodoo Doll" and "Waste the Night" reliably take the room — but the new songs are not treated as a tax to be paid. "No. 1 Obsession", "Boyband" and the title track sit in the first third and hold up next to "Teeth" and "Easier".