Youngblood

"Despite their tightness as a band - years of gigging have produced a crisp rock unit on a technical par with their influences Blink-182 and Green Day - it's hard to see 5SOS achieving legitimacy among adult listeners ... The Vamps apart, guitar-playing boybands are rare these days, especially ones determined to get rocky or die trying: 5 Seconds of Summer's ambition is admirable rather than laughable".

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"While there are plenty of hooks here, the dancey pop attitude is matched by a growing maturity with lyrics about growing weary of the party scene, the emptiness of touring, and yearning for that one perfect love. All of which seems to fit a band, almost eight years into its career, whose original fans are just as likely to be filling out college applications as heading to Coachella".

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"With its eternal ties to awkward post-adolescent angst, pop-punk is not a genre that's meant to carry a band through a full career. So it's not surprising that on their third album, 5 Seconds of Summer have already aged out of the sound that built their success. Instead, Youngblood goes full pop, leaning into some Eighties inflection and foregoing the bratty, DGAF ethos of their earlier work ... A downside of the new sound is that the boys lose a little bit of the spunk that made them big in the first place. The snottiness of pop-punk highlighted their natural humor, and while they've certainly grown as musicians, singers and writers, a bit of that goofy charm is missing".

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