Album Spotlight: Luke Hemmings — ‘Boy’ (2024)
Luke Hemmings — ‘Boys’ EP cover. Image credit: RCA Records
‘This is an EP of ‘deaths in the mirror’ — or the expiration of younger selves, relatable to all in their twenties… whether or not you’re a popstar.’
In honour of the return of 5 Seconds Of Summer to London next month, we’re shining a beam on lead singer Luke Hemmings’ 2024 solo EP ‘boy’for our March album spotlight.
At 7 tracks long, it’s half an album, technically, though that doesn't stop it from telling a comprehensive and beautifully woven story of ego and …
Aussie four-piece 5 Seconds of Summer returned last year with their first joint album in 3 years, titled ‘Everyone’s A Star’. It details and reframes the boyband narrative and lived experience, inviting fans to reconnect with their world, albeit from a plane of much greater self-awareness, and sometimes irony. Though listening to ‘boy’, it’s clear the bones of the idea were circling for at least a year prior, ruminating in more primal thought processes.
‘boy’ is melancholy, aching and introverted. It’s a peek behind the hotel-room-curtain of a life in the spotlight. Find out why it’s our March album spotlight below.
‘Romanticise a dark city’: depth and darkness in ‘boy’
Testament to the EP’s cover art – this body of work sounds just like the colour palette it was plated with: deep blues, murky shadows, and hints of glimmering light.
In lead single ‘Shakes’, Hemmings takes us on an introspective midnight walk under the streetlights, real or imagined, from the window of a high-rise hotel, like a self-inflicted Rapunzel. ‘The city tends to move on all the same’ the then-27-year old muses, despondent and dejected.
This EP is absolutely a late-night listen. Hemmings is constantly referencing the shadows of the night and the mind: in dark hotel rooms, dark cities, long nights (and ‘damn cold’ ones), dreams, evening news, closing eyes, and leaving trains.
It’s a pretty lonely album, but one that feels expansive, and, finally, sees some of the light that’s decorated in the corner of Luke Hemmings’ eye shadow. After 20 minutes of Hemmings feeling displaced and restless, final track ‘Promises’ is the first time we hear him want to ‘stay here’. In fact, he’s asking someone else, and the lullaby-like delivery of the line reveals more vulnerability with each repetition.
Featuring soft, feminine background vocals from Sierra Deaton, it’s like the EP finally reaches outside of Hemmings’ own head. It’s a gentle, peaceful ending to an album littered with anxiety… and it’s even more romantic when you learn that it’s Luke Hemmings’ real wife who’s voice we’re hearing over his own.
“‘boy’ is melancholy, aching and introverted. It’s a peek behind the hotel-room-curtain of a life in the spotlight.”
Anxious Nostalgia As A Side Effect Of Fame
A major theme across the EP is the impossible toss-and-turn of life on the road, and a dream that makes distance a key component of routine. Hemmings’ second solo release is deeply confessional, revealing substance abuse, anger issues and crippling isolation. Beneath it all, a desire to connect with and return to an innocent, younger version of himself, one he seems to accept he can’t return to as the album progresses.
‘I wasn't always a cynic / It's just I've been bought and sold’ he sings on the final track – a reflection of the industry’s grip on an adolescence spent in the Australian boyband – formed when he was just 15.
‘Benny’, named after Hemmings’ brother, reveals a reality few can understand – the paradox of becoming a stranger to your closest friends and family… the strange normality of being unfamiliar with their daily lives and characters: ‘Watching from the outside’ / ‘Living on the sidelines’. The song creeps forward with sadness, guilt, and anxiety, and its luscious chorus of harmonies echo round headphones like an intrusive thought.
“Testament to the EP’s cover art – this body of work sounds just like the colour palette it was plated with: deep blues, murky shadows, and hints of glimmering light... It’s a pretty lonely album, but one that feels expansive, and, finally, sees some of the light that’s decorated in the corner of Luke Hemmings’ eye shadow.”
LUKE Hemmings’ Threads Listeners Through His ‘Mirror Deaths’
It’s difficult for artists to do this without coming across as gimmicky – though Hemmings has pulled off lyrical continuity across the EP. Compare the lines between each consecutive song below, as we make our way down the tracklist. The journey takes us along with a person who believes they have someone (or something), to chasing, losing and mourning it, before gradually finding peace where they are, with what’s around them.
‘I’m still your boy’ → ‘I just want to be yours’
‘I can't help but chase you’ → ‘Should I be on a plane back home?’
‘Will I be saying goodbye from a dark hotel room?’ → ‘I never got to say goodbye’
‘All the people hidin’ in your garden’ → ‘It’s a garden life, you are the weeping willow’
‘I am alcohol… lulling you to sleep’ → ‘I wanna be the last dream inside your head’
‘Can you drive me home?’ → ‘Oh, just tell me it's too late to drive’
These songs don’t flow neatly from one to the next, though each does seem like an abstract answer to the one before. It’s touches like these which help the EP feel so complete and considered, more like watching sporadic episodes from the same series rather than a complete film. Hemmings morphs multiple concepts lost and found: an identity before fame, a lover, a closeness to family and ‘home’, and a sense of normalcy in a highly unusual lifestyle.
This is an EP of ‘deaths in the mirror’ — or the expiration of younger selves, relatable to all in their twenties… whether or not you’re a popstar. As in the experience of listening through, the anxiety is gently squeezed out and away.