“Youngblood” by 5 Seconds of Summer, Monday, June 17, 2024

A big part of my blog is discovering music. Sometimes that’s new indie artists with very little written except for press releases. But what I’ve found more often is that I’ve been unearthing the long-lost civilization of the 2010s, a decade I scoffed at as the nadir of music. During the pandemic, though, I started listening to new music, finding the newer songs resonating with me in ways that the 2010s didn’t. But then I started going back, re-evaluating pop, rock, and alternative in the 2010s, listening with an open mind. I realized that music was changing and that loyalty to any genre was an illusion. Alternative playlists reminded me of what would pass for pop music in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Bedroom pop, dream pop, hip-hop, and neo-soul flooded the playlists. Now I see that as a strength rather than a weakness.

SAY YOU WANT ME OUTTA YOUR LIFE. One of the tracks that showed up on an Apple Music Alternative Hits playlist was “Youngblood” by 5 Seconds of Summer, called 5SOS by fans. My musical diet in the 2010s was Christian, K-pop/K-hip hop, and queer pop, so I missed out on several alternative acts--the height of Paramore and Twenty One Pilots, though I was aware of them. But I thought that 5 Seconds of Summer was a boy band like One Direction or The Wanted. The Australian band did come to fame by opening for One Direction on their 2014 Take Me Home tour. The band’s name floated around in South Korean entertainment shows, but I didn’t realize that they were actually big in America--three number-one debuting Billboard 200 albums big. Their 2018 single, “Youngblood” was the band’s biggest single in America and Australia. In America, the song peaked at number 7 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song’s inclusion on an Apple Music Alternative Hits playlist is interesting as boy band music in 2018--in America--was in a valley. One Direction had gone on hiatus in 2016, and Jonas Brothers wouldn’t come back until the next year, though BTS was breaking into America about this time. 

LOVE ME ‘TILL THE DAY I DIE. The official music video for “Youngblood” was released in August 2019 while 5 Seconds of Summer was touring in Japan. In 2017, before they recorded their third record, 5SOS had been featured on a song by Japanese rock band One Ok Rock. The video for “Youngblood” starred a Japanese cast with 5SOS not appearing in the video. Director Frank Borin stylizes a nutro Japanese greaser/ rockabilly-stylized video with modern video stylizations. The plot of the video follows a Japanese elderly couple who take pills and recall their youth, presumably in the 1950s. The motion of the video and the apparent electronic glitches both set a modern anachronistic mood (as do modern shots of Tokyo) and make the music video open to interpretation. As a song, “Youngblood” is full of energy. The lyrics speak of a romantic entanglement that is not easily broken. It seems like a break-up song, but the speaker and his love seem to be pushing and pulling, leaving the speaker to feel “like a dead man walking.” Yet, the “Youngblood” makes the song sound like the speaker and his partner can overcome whatever it is that is in the way.  But maybe that’s the music video doing the interpretation. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.