It’s not often that Luke Hemmings finds himself on his own. For the better part of the past 12 years, the 27-year-old singer and songwriter has shared the stage with his three bandmates in 5 Seconds of Summer. The Australian pop-rock band has built its career around being a relentless touring act, playing to thousands-deep audiences on nearly back-to-back runs in support of five studio albums. Four years ago, when that cycle was interrupted for the first time, Hemmings retreated into himself. His first solo album, When Facing the Things We Turn Away From (2021), was a meditation on a decade’s worth of experiences he didn’t have time to process as they were happening. That kind of self-interrogation would continue as he sought to understand himself more deeply on an individual level, and recently, he realized he felt inklings of isolation while deeply immersed in crowds. He felt it while glancing out of car windows in Los Angeles, his home away from his native Sydney; touring the world with 5SOS; and walking the streets of New York, where he wrote most of his second solo project, Boy, out April 26. “It has this loneliness and this yearning to be home again, but in different ways,” Hemmings tells Rolling Stone over Zoom from L.A. “I’m surrounded by people all the time. I’m in hotels and planes and playing shows and all this stuff, which obviously has great parts in that. But for some reason, I’ve found it more difficult to be on tour recently, just mentally and within myself as a person.”
During those stretches of time away from home, the singer found himself transfixed on watching his world change in real time. “People are having kids, people are getting married — or they’re not and they’re stressed about it,” Hemmings, who is married to songwriter Sierra Deaton, explains. “Life starts happening whether you’re checking in or not.”
“Shakes,” the first single from Boy, sifts through this sense of wonder. Reuniting with producer Sammy Witte (Harry Styles, SZA, Halsey), Hemmings moves through a haze of perspectives marked by different distortions of his own voice. Even when he’s alternating between narrator and protagonist — like when his yearning for comfort is interrupted by the whispered realization “the city tends to move on all the same” — it’s all still him. “Whenever I try and write from other perspectives, I’ll get across some things and some details will come in,” he says. “But then eventually, particularly with the nature of this as a solo thing, it always ends up being autobiographical to some extent. If I try and run from that, it always seems to catch up to me.”
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Here, Hemmings tells Rolling Stone about exploring existential, childlike wonder on Boy, challenging the boundaries of his anxiety while becoming more confident outside of 5SOS, and what he’s most excited about exploring musically and visually as a solo artist. “Shakes” essentially being a love song is such a contrast to When Facing the Things We Turn Away From, where you were mostly sitting with and interrogating these dark and complicated feelings. What made you want to lead with it?
It initially started in New York as one of the earliest songs that was written for this. I was experimenting with writing from other people’s perspectives and observing. Almost in a Lost in Translation way, where you’re observing the world and real life seems a bit intense. That’s where the chorus came from. The chorus was written a year and a half ago, and then some of the verses were written two months ago. The story sort of changes, and it becomes this mix of different feelings because over those nine months since you wrote the first part, you’ve obviously lived even more. Songs take on new meanings even as you’re writing them, which was really cool to experience. It still has the feeling of the first album, but it is different and I wanted to lead with that, which I think is really a bit braver.