- 2024-04-27
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MUSIC
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Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ Luke Hemmings Releases New Solo EP “boy”
Australian pop rock band 5 Seconds of Summer's lead singer Luke Hemmings released his new solo EP “boy” on April 26, 2024 via Arista Records.
It is his first solo project in three years since the 2021 debut solo album “When Facing the Things We Turn Away From”.
The EP comprises a concise and cohesive 7-track collection, on which he worked with longtime collaborator Sammy Witte, each track offering a new sense of maturity, growth, and humanity for Luke Hemmings.
The debut solo album was written and recorded during the COVID-19 lockdowns. But the new EP was written as he toured the world with 5 Seconds of Summer.
Luke Hemmings said of the EP, “The majority of the songs for boy were written at a time in my life when I was a stranger to stillness. The songs were born on planes and hotel room notepads, muttering under my breath while walking through new cities each day. I was disoriented and overwhelmed by the world and my place in it. Those emotions weaved themselves through this project. The longing for more emotional understanding within myself, the isolation, grief, love, sadness and hope. They're not intended to be consumed as autobiographical facts, but as an overly dramatic, cathartic, poetic stream of my consciousness. As if you've opened my diary and can only read a line from each page.”- He shared on social media, “I can't believe it's here… after all the hours spent in hotels, planes, studios, and at home to get to this point. I poured so much heart into this project and all the visuals surrounding it in the hopes that you could feel and see the music as much as you could hear it. The songs on this EP are jumbled lines of my diary, bits and pieces of my chaotic mind, and fogged up windows into my life.”
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Luke Hemmings explained track-by-track for the EP via Apple Music.
“I'm Still Your Boy”
“This song really encompasses the ache I wanted to get across and the growing pains it took to become a fully realized adult version of myself. It's only until I started thinking of having children of my own that I began reflecting on the struggles I had myself as a teenager who grew up in the public eye. This song is about understanding my youth that was marred with trauma amidst beauty, whilst trying to become a good man. 'I'm Still Your Boy' walks on the high wire between boyhood and adulthood, looking both ways.”
“Shakes”
“'Shakes' was written on a dreary evening in between long periods of travel and touring, so it easily came from an incredibly melancholy place. A feeling of yearning to be back home, of feeling lonely and emotionally desperate and depleted. There is a longing for love and self-acceptance in the lyrics, and I hope it to be a song that anyone listening [to] can find themselves in and attach their own story.”
“Benny”
“This song is named after my brother, Ben, but in its entirety, it represents all of my loved ones and the guilt I feel being away from my family and living on the periphery of their world. It represents the mornings I wake up in a panic, anxious and worried that today will be the day I get bad news. News that would make my dreams of making music seem infantile and pointless. I'd do anything for the people I love.”
“Close My Eyes”
“I wrote 'Close My Eyes' as I headed into my late twenties and felt an unavoidable wave of fear and anxiety towards the inevitable death of my youth. I found myself unable to sleep because every time I tried, it was as if a film of my life was projected onto the back of my eyelids—the mistakes, successes, everything that could have been, and everything that was. I was sonically trying to tap into 2000s indie rock bands like LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture.”
“Garden Life”
“I had the idea for 'Garden Life' when I couldn't sleep in a hotel room somewhere in the world, sometime around 3am. The next morning, I went for a walk and wrote the lyrics on a park bench, watching life pass me by. It's really just an existential love song to my happiest and safest place. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that sometimes the most beautiful and visceral memories in life are not the most grand and obvious ones, they can be simple and powerful. It's not always the fireworks on New Year's Eve. Sometimes it's a Friday night sitting on the couch listening to your favorite person laugh.”
“Close Enough to Feel You”
“This song was inspired by sounds from Cocteau Twins and my bloody valentine, who I listened to heavily during the making of boy. The beauty in 'Close Enough to Feel You' is all in the details, both sonically and lyrically. Sometimes when you suffer a big emotional loss, something so mundane and otherwise unnoticed can become earth-shattering. A glimpse of a photo out of the corner of your eye, a stain on the carpet, an old sweater, sends you into the fetal position. This song is about the willingness and desire to live in that pain in order to feel close to who or what you lost, rather than moving on.”
“Promises”
“'Promises' was the song written for the EP that finally made me feel like I was really onto something. It started with merely a drum beat, which I find ironic as I'm not a drummer. But I think maybe it's that naïveté that led to this song being created. It's about a time in my life when I saw the world through gray-colored glasses. I was a pessimist, struggling with depression and my mental health, who fell in love and started to see color for the first time.” - source : Apple Music
