photographer TOM J. JOHNSON assisted by KIERA SIMPSON
fashion NATHAN HENRY assisted by STOYAN CHUCHURANOV
tailor SOPHIE STONYER
make up KITE CHUANG
hair CHAD MAXWELL
movement direction LIAM JOHN
full story in KENZO
LUKE HEMMINGS’ NEW EP WAS BIRTHED OUT OF AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. FROM ‘BOY’ TO MAN AND BACK AGAIN, LUKE HEMMINGS IS FIGURING HIMSELF OUT, ONE EMOTIONAL ORDEAL AT A TIME.
words by Bailey Slater
Last year, Luke Hemmings began to feel a strange stirring deep inside his bones. The bright-eyed boy rocker, who came to prominence as the devilishly handsome frontman of Australian pop-punk outfit 5 Seconds Of Summer, likens it to an ache, an unmistakable pang of emotion readying itself to surface, and one that he’d been trying to pin down for a minute. What kind of artist would he be were he to ignore this call, forgoing the task of working it out into something tangible, something real? It was a strangeness he sat with for some time, before heading to New York to try and play it out of his system, a mode of working that’s not entirely dissimilar to a sonic exorcism. “There were some things going on with me personally – being away so much, and travelling,” says the singer, recalling his hectic tour schedule at the time. “It’s a very insular feeling when you’re in that state of mind, you see the world in a different way, watching people live out their lives. You’re in a new city every day, which is super rad, and sometimes awesome,” he counters, “but sometimes this is you feeling like an outsider looking in on life.” As would later become apparent in the studio, when a simple drum beat slotted perfectly into a mammoth chorus, the feeling was one of melancholy. As necessary to the human condition as water or listening to Mariah Carey at Christmas, the exploration of intense sorrow has been particularly well-documented in music, oftentimes rendering its subject completely debilitated. But for Hemmings, this epiphany was welcomed with open arms, a shining ribbon that engulfed his many woes and would go on to form the beating heart of his forthcoming EP. “It was sort of off to the races after that,” grins the singer. In early March, Hemmings released his first single in three years, “Shakes”, painting a vivid picture of this inner turmoil as he evoked deadly touches and the agonising crawl of time. “Can we share the lonely if my heart is small?” he asks on the track, “Is it better to feel this or feel nothing at all?” It’s an undeniably raw effort, which Hemmings does well to mask with layers of dripping reverb, navigating a dream-like stasis whereby his pain is numbed with scintillating surf-rock guitars and glimmering synths. Shakes trades in visuals of towering cityscapes and towerblocks lit in cold, moody blues, a purposeful nod to the lavish and isolating metropolis depicted in Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation. The film takes place in Tokyo at the turn of the millennium and stews on the loneliness felt by two transplants in a foreign city that seems to offer everything in abundance, except the chance for close personal connection. Mirroring Hemmings’ own sense of listlessness is Charlotte, the film’s restless 20-something-newlywed-protagonist who is haunted by the spectre of the city skyline in her high-rise hotel room, a pseudo-sanctuary nested high above the chaos.
“The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you.“
Both projects touch keenly on the theme of loneliness being something universal, Hemmings’ being written in New York and filmed in Bogota, and how acutely this can be felt no matter how full your life looks on paper. In one scene, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) asks her platonic older companion, a fading film star in town to shoot a whiskey commerical (Bill Murray), if ‘it’ gets any easier. His reply at first is teasing, then sincere. “The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you.” In this way, “Shakes” is Hemmings’ stab at figuring out adulthood and the many pitfalls that come with it. “I was turning 27 and I wanted to sum up how that age felt to me at the time,” he adds, “that’s sort of how I work through things, and that’s where [the EP – boy] kicked off.” At the heart of this melodrama is a score devised by Kevin Shields, whose own gauzy, strung-out productions at the fore of My Bloody Valentine have inspired decade upon decade of moody shoegazers in his wake, including Hemmings. Other references for the project include that of Cocteau Twins and The Verve to the solo work of Julian Casablancas and LCD Soundsystem, the former in particular synonymous with a world of enveloping, dreamy soundscapes that Hemmings does well to make his own in this new era. Helping him build these dreamy walls of sound is none other than Sammy Witte, the co-architect of Hemmings’ 2021 debut, When Facing the Things We Turn Away From. The pair met through a mutual friend while Hemmings was writing during the post-Covid months and hit it off instantly. “It was very one-on-one, a real personal and intimate writer-producer relationship,” he says.
“It’s nice to have a relationship that’s already a thing, as opposed to going in with someone new because of songs I’m writing.“
“It’s nice to have a relationship that’s already a thing, as opposed to going in with someone new because of songs I’m writing. I could just send Sammy an idea and he’d be like, “this isn’t right” or “I like this part of it”. It makes my songwriting come out much more natural and personal than meeting someone for the first time, when it’s much more difficult to dive into things. And we have all references from the first album, so it was easier to get [boy] where we both wanted it to go.” Where the former project aimed to make sense of a decade in the business, a loss of youth and his first real break since coming to fame in the early 2010s, boy simmers in this angst by honing in on the existential and wistful. Hemmings penned most of the project while on vocal rest, perhaps an almost frantic way of reclaiming his voice when rendered physically unable to use it. As a result, the singer was eager to speak power to all the potent uncertainties that live in the mind from the jump, touching on mature themes far more soul-bearing than his earlier work would allow. Hemmings grew up in the sprawling countryside suburb of Freemans Reach, located on Australia’s East Coast. Save for a local general store and the company of his older brothers, his immediate vicinity was a vision of vast, green emptiness, conditions anyone from a small town knows to breed big imaginations and an unsatiable yearning for more, whatever that was. His musical journey began at age 10, when Hemmings was gifted his first guitar and quickly took to filling his time by teaching himself how to play via tutorials on YouTube. Just a few years beyond reaching a level of superstardom that befits world tours and fan clubs filled with leagues of adoring fans, the artist took his interest in music and performance one step further and began busking in his early teens. Frequenting pubs dotted across the fringe of Sydney, Hemmings faced the daunting challenge of winning over inebriated punters with a selection of his favourite heady rock classics from Aussie-born behemoths like INXS, Midnight Oil and AC/DC. “Trying to end on a high note was a big thing,” he says of the lessons he learned in those threadbare days on the stage, a stellar piece of advice that’s slowly become ritual for his own tours. As the singer settled into adolesence, he flitted from his parents’ affinity for trad-rock and dove headfirst expressive pop-punk of transatlantic acts such as blink-182 and Green Day – “that was the first time I found music I really loved on my own” – and committed himself to musical performance by forming a band of his own, with fellow schoolfriends Calum Hood and Michael Clifford. Initially a trio, the group then inducted mutual friend Ashton Irwin, a drummer, into their ranks, and began filming YouTube videos as 5SOS, putting a youthful (and very much pixellated) and acoustic stamp on tracks like Ed Sheeran’s “The A-Team” & Busted’s “Year 3000” with covers that have since racked up millions of views – and still remain on their channel to this day. “We started really young, and I knew I really wanted to be in music somehow. I loved performing, I loved being able to play those songs, I was trying to write too. But because of where I grew up, and the likelihood of it, I didn’t think it would be a full-time job,” says Hemmings. “I was just looking for ways to fund playing at pubs.” The boys played their first show in December of 2011, at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney, announcing the gig on a Facebook post that ends: “be there or be squeareular”. And just over a year later, Hemmings would make good on his wish by scoring a supporting slot on tour with Britain’s biggest cultural export since The Beatles (that’s One Direction in case you were wondering).
The ensuing tour propelled the foursome to an international stage, and the next decade of their lives would be spent crafting a discography that seamlessly blended pop, punk, classic rock and raucous new wave to tremendous success. “We’re the sort of band that was at the tail end of selling CDs,” he says, illustrating the seemingly huge gulf of time that’s passed from then till now. “Well,” he pauses, “at least we were selling CDs.” Point being, Hemmings has seen the music industry change profoundly in the interim, touching on the rise of indie artists being discovered on TikTok bearing close resemblance to his own journey, and is markedly proud of the band for sticking it out as the industry grapples with a multitude of new players and platforms. Lockdowns aside, you could say Hemmings’ feet haven’t really touched the ground since the band’s stratospheric rise, now over a decade ago. “Honestly, it was a lot at once,” he says. “Even though we were young, we were always trying to focus on being a great live band and writing great songs. Those were the things we held on to, and I’m really happy that we picked that up for such a young age. I wish I was able to take it in more, maybe. But I just think it’s really cool that we hung on, and we’re still friends now, and we still play some of those songs on tour” – the oh-so-Tumblr, American Apparel namedropping She Looks So Perfect being one of them – “they have a whole new meaning to me now, it makes me so proud.” Having just wrapped on 5SOS’ colossal World Tour, Hemmings touches on the experience of perpetually being on the road, itself a hurricane of intense camaraderie, late nights and severe lack of personal space. It was here in those seemingly endless stretches of travel between states and cities that he found time for more than a little introspection, letting his thoughts and subconscious word vomit unfurl onto the page. Little by little, the singer worked these strands into poems and verses, tinkering with the idea of space, not just in the celestial sense, but also interrogating his emotional state in reaction to his immediate physical environments. His latest single, a jangly guitar-ballad titled “Close My Eyes”, channels the many conflicting emotions of this journey with gratitude and hubris. Lines like: “Don’t be sad in the middle of life with no time to mourn” grapple with the bitter-sweet awareness of passing time. But rather than fearing all he might’ve missed from relentlessly grinding as a musician, be that time with his wife, Sierra Deaton, or even a ‘normal’ pivot into adulthood, Hemmings flips these feelings into a manifesto on living in the moment and riding the tumult of emotions to their dazzling and oft-hedonistic conclusions. Even when wrapping our interview on the only non-music topic Hemmings has touched on so far, his reading habits, this art form at the core of his very being is never far. He’s currently mid-way through Patti Smith’s Just Kids – a tale of love, both romantic and platonic, and making it big amongst the artistic milieu of 1970s/80s New York. The book was a present from the guitar tech of Hemmings’ aforementioned World Tour, reaching the singer at almost the perfect time in his life. Like Smith & her once partner and confidant, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Hemmings is making his next steps in life away from the creative forces that characterised its beginning. The bond is still intact, forever cherished, but a new path must be forged. So back to boyhood we go.
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