5 Seconds of Summer

About

5 Seconds of Summer is an Australian pop punk band consisting of members Luke Hemmings, Michael Clifford, Calum Hood and Ashton Irwin. The band rose to notoriety online in 2011 after posting cover versions of pop songs on YouTube.

Online History

On February 3rd, 2011, Hemmings uploaded his first video to YouTube, in which he covers the 2011 pop song “Please Don’t Go” by Mike Posner on an acoustic guitar (shown below, left). In the next four years, the video gained over 910,000 views and 6,300 comments. In March, the @5SOS Twitter^[2] feed was launched. On April 4th, the band’s Facebook^[1] page was created. In 3.5 years, the Twitter gathered upwards of 4.74 million followers and the Facebook accumulated more than 7.3 million likes. Hemmings continued to upload solo covers until April 16th, when he posted a video with band mate Calum Hood asking fans to follow the Facebook and Twitter pages for 5 Seconds of Summer (shown below, right).

On June 4th, the band uploaded their first cover video, featuring a rendition of the 2004 alternative rock song “I Miss You” by Blink 182 (shown below). The band continued to upload covers to the YouTube channel, many of which reached over one million views. In December, drummer Ashton Irwin joined the group. On February 14th, 2013, 5 Seconds of Summer was booked to tour with the British-Irish boy band One Direction for their “Take Me Home” tour.

5 Seconds of Summer Album

On February 5th, 2014, the band released their debut single “She Looks So Perfect”, which was followed by a music video for the song on YouTube later that month (shown below). On June 27th, the band’s debut album 5 Seconds of Summer was released in Europe and Australia.

Derp Con

On August 28th, 2014, the 5 Seconds of Summer YouTube channel uploaded a video announcing a fan convention for the band titled “Derp Con,” with plans to hold the event on November 15th and 16th in Los Angeles, California (shown below).

Fandom

Several 5 Seconds of Summer Tumblr blogs have been launched by fans of the group, including 5sos-at-heart,^[3] FallenFor5SOS^[4] and 5SauceFeels.^[5] On DeviantArt,^[6] over 5,850 fan arts depicting the band have been submitted with the tag “5 seconds of summer.”