HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Sounds Good Feels Good – 5 Seconds of Summer
2015 was a year that rock started to show its softer pop underbelly. Rising stars such as HALSEY were making a splash onto the scene with her alternative pop debut album Badlands, TWENTY ONE PILOTS had released their fourth album, Blurryface in May that year, and NECK DEEP‘s Life’s Not Out to Get You was a large part of a pop-punk revival. They started to share magazine covers with the So it wasn’t a surprise when 5 SECONDS OF SUMMER – one of the most polarising bands in the scene thanks to being known as the opening act for boyband ONE DIRECTION – released their sophomore album, Sounds Good Feels Good in October 2015.
Their self-titled debut album was a pop-heavy album with rock undertones, apart from on the bonus tracks, where they leaned heavily into rock music. But in the case of their sophomore album, they committed themselves to the pop-rock sound. Not only that, but they also leaned into heavier topics than just teenage love, covering topics such as mental health, warring parents, and wanting to escape town. But, ten years on, how does it hold up?
Sounds Good Feels Good was produced by John Feldmann, Mike Green, David Hodges, and The Monsters and the Strangerz. Although it has all these producers, it still manages to stay coherent throughout its runtime. The standard version of the album is 52 minutes and 57 seconds, which makes it the band’s longest album to date. Across fourteen songs, 5 SECONDS OF SUMMER covered everything.
It starts off deceptively upbeat, as opening song Money glorifies a night on the town, She’s Kinda Hot is a rallying cry for outcasts to come together to find somewhere to belong, and Hey Everybody! (whose chorus melody samples from Hungry Like The Wolf by DURAN DURAN, who got a writing credit) is about how money isn’t everything. But as the album continues, the songs get darker and more serious. Fan-favourite Jet Black Heart is the first song to encapsulate this, as it details the struggles that people go through, but ends on a hopeful note about the future.
The album’s middle section gets a little muddled, with songs such as Catch Fire, Waste The Night, and Vapor having similar melodies and structures, which makes all the songs blend into one. Thankfully, the album picks itself up again with Castaway. Although it deals with the topic of lovers drifting apart, the upbeat guitar-driven melody and the mature sounding lyrics differentiates it from other songs that the band have written in the past.
However, it is the last quarter of the album where the band really shine. Invisible sees bassist Calum Hood take centre stage on vocals, as a typewriter clicks away in the background mixed with an acoustic guitar. The song’s stripped back approach makes the lyrics – which talks about feeling lost in life – are some of the most mature on the album, which was written when the band were still in their late teens and early twenties.
Airplanes is an upbeat song with lyrics that talk about moving to a new city, whereas San Francisco is a mid-tempo song that longs for a time that has gone. Closing song Outer Space / Carry On is a song of two halves. The six minute and thirty-eight second track is the longest 5 Seconds of Summer song to date. The first part Outer Space is another upbeat pop-rock song dedicated to a love; however, it never falls into cliché territory, although it does threaten to a couple of times as the bridge of the song consists of the line “The darkest night never felt so bright with you by my side”, that is repeated several times. Thankfully, the last part, Carry On turns things around. The stripped back song is a far cry from the energetic opening, but its simplicity is its strength. The album closes on a note, telling the listener that “You know it’s going to get better.”
Just like with their debut album, some of the band’s best material are on the deluxe edition of the album. Thankfully, they are cleverly placed throughout the album, with Safety Pin – an energetic song about fixing each other – placed in between Catch Fire and Waste The Night. However, the two songs that show the maturity of the band are The Girl Who Cried Wolf and Broken Home. The former is a medium-paced acoustic song about reassuring someone that you are truly there for them, even if they don’t initially accept it. However, Broken Home is one of the saddest and most mature songs on the album. It’s a raw, acoustic song about the realities that a child has to deal with in a home where parents don’t love each other anymore, which is rarely discussed in life, let alone on an album.
Critically, Sounds Good Feels Good received mixed-to-positive reviews, but commercially, it was the band’s first UK Number One album (followed by 2020’s Calm and 2022’s 5SOS5), and they were the first band (not vocal group) to have their first two full-length albums debut at Number One on the Billboard chart. They sold 200k copies in the US alone. 5 SECONDS OF SUMMER went on the worldwide tour Sounds Live Feels Live to celebrate the album’s release, and on their most recent tour in 2023, they played five songs from this album.
Overall, Sounds Good Feels Good by 5 SECONDS OF SUMMER showed that the Australian quartet were quietly moving forward and heading in a mature direction with their sound and lyrics, which they would continue to develop on subsequent album releases. Although their sound has evolved drastically in the ten years since its release, Sounds Good Feels Good laid the groundwork for who they are today.
Sounds Good Feels Good was originally released on October 23rd, 2015 via Capitol Records.
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