‘It Wouldn’t Feel Right If I Wasn’t Honest’: Calum Hood Embraces Order & Chaos On His Debut Solo Album
As Calum Hood readies to release his debut solo album, he explores how channelling 2000s indie rock and vulnerability informed ‘ORDER chaos ORDER.’
Calum Hood (Credit: Sara Regan)
For the last fourteen years, Calum Hood has existed in the spotlight as a member of the pop-rock band, 5 Seconds Of Summer.
As the bassist, co-vocalist, and keyboardist, Hood played on five albums with his bandmates: their self-titled debut album in 2014, Sounds Good Feels Good in 2015, Youngblood in 2018, Calm in 2020, and 5SOS5 in 2022. The band found international acclaim opening for One Direction on their Take Me Home tour, and grew their home audience.
Since 2014, the Aussie pop-rockers have sold over ten million albums, over two million concert tickets across the globe, and amassed more than seven billion streams on streaming services. Their single, Youngblood, is the highest-selling Australian single of the 2010s, and the eleventh highest-selling single in Australian history. Today, they’re one of the most successful Australian musical acts of all time.
With the band’s success grew the individual members’ confidence, all of whom have gone solo. Drummer and co-vocalist Ashton Irwin dropped his debut solo album, Superbloom, in 2020. In 2021, lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Luke Hemmings went solo with his debut album, When Facing The Things We Turn Away From. Earlier this year, lead guitarist and singer Michael Clifford announced his debut project, Sidequest.
At times, fans must have wondered: What about Calum? This Friday, 13 June, allow Calum Hood to reintroduce himself as he releases his long-awaited debut solo album, ORDER chaos ORDER via EMI Music Australia.
Chatting to The Music on Zoom from Los Angeles, Hood admits that his bandmates and the great unknown influenced his decision to go solo. “My bandmates inspired me… the unknown. Like, going into the unknown and not really knowing what was on the other side inspired my curiosity and my willingness to submit to the notion of being an artist.
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“It’s an amazing motivator, if you can tap into the ratio of fear and determination and balance that, it’s great—it can work in your favour.”
Hood announced the release of his debut solo album in early April. The announcement of ORDER chaos ORDER also came accompanied by the release of Hood’s debut solo single, Don’t Forget You Love Me.
“This album was made in a tumble dryer of knowing and not knowing,” Hood explained upon announcing the album. “I started out with a vision—order—but quickly became overwhelmed by the process—chaos. Eventually, I learned to embrace both, and that balance became the heart of the record.
“There are things I’ve never been able to sing about in the band—my upbringing, my family, the places life has taken me. This album is about laying those things to rest and allowing listeners to connect in their own way.”
ORDER chaos ORDER is, well, ordered and chaotic. Hood says that the process of making his debut solo album was “so much fun, looking back.”
He continues, “I wish I could relive it again. Yeah, and I think I was just more curious at the time about what it could turn out to be. I think a lot of the songs took a while to evolve into their final form; their final evolution. So, it was exciting for me to be able to tap in and then zoom out and watch them turn into whatever they turned into.”
Songs such as Call Me When You Know Better, Endless Ways, and Streetwise are upbeat rock songs, while the lead single Don’t Forget You Love Me is straight-up vibey, calling back to 2000s and 2010s indie rock bands such as Phoenix, The Radio Dept., Arctic Monkeys and Interpol.
“That’s the music I love,” Hood confirms. “I always go back to timeless songs. So, it’s definitely nice to be a part of it again.”
Don’t Forget You Love Me not only serves as the album’s emotional cornerstone but also introduces listeners to the raw honesty Hood shares throughout ORDER chaos ORDER. Written and produced by TMS (Lewis Capaldi, Ed Sheeran) and Jack LaFrantz (Benson Boone), it showcases the haunting beauty Hood has captured in his solo venture. For the full-length, he teamed up with Jackson Phillips (aka Day Wave), David Burris (Lauren Spencer Smith, ITZY) and TMS for the emotionally stirring indie rock release.
Throughout the album, Hood wears his heart on his sleeve and pays homage to those who have inspired him. He really shows off his artistry later in the album, slowing things down on Sweetdreams and I Wanted To Stay, bringing acoustic guitar into All My Dreams, and Britpop elements on Sunsetter. There are so many ideas scattered throughout the album that Hood honestly didn’t know they’d all work out.
“I didn’t [know],” Hood shares. “I really just gravitate towards that style of songwriting. It’s more reflective, and it’s a little more intrinsic, and it’s a little more mood-based, and the mood is usually melancholic; that’s just what I naturally go towards. So, I just followed whatever compass I felt intuitively about that was kind of directing me to showing my most truthful version of myself.”
He adds, “I think with the concepts, or the lyrics, I really wanted [them] to shine. I really wanted it to be a window into a part of myself. That was a big goal of mine going into it.”
ORDER chaos ORDER was born from a “deeply personal creative journey” that allowed Hood to mine areas of himself that he couldn’t offer to his 5SOS bandmates. He explores love, longing, grief, trauma, and his upbringing, all while remaining vulnerable and honest.
Discussing the challenges of getting so personal on the album, Hood notes, “It wouldn’t feel right if I wasn’t honest.
“There’s some songs that are very brutally honest, that are very direct, and some leave more room for imagination, that are a little more lyrically… what’s the word? More lyrically, I guess, esoteric, but that sounds like a bit of an airy word to use. I just wanted to find a balance between people really getting to know me and then also leaving it up to them to decide.”
The vulnerability on ORDER chaos ORDER is clear from the very first track, Don’t Forget You Love Me, where Hood sings, “12 am on Taco Tuesday/ I’m crying out my eyes/ And I’m sitting there wondering/ If I want to be alive.” He says of the lyrics, “That was a proprietary into me choosing that song for the first single; for the first thing that anyone ever heard from me.
“I think it’s a normal feeling for people to be feeling that deeply, and to be able to verbalise that is a privilege of a songwriter and being an artist. I felt like, these are real things that occur in my brain, and I think it’s nice to be able to normalise that kind of deepness within the spectrum of how someone thinks, I guess.”
Hood examines his upbringing on the album, something that had to feature on ORDER chaos ORDER. “It’s such a huge part of who I am,” he tells. “I’m a hugely family-oriented man, and I find a lot of my strength and a lot of my solidarity within myself derives from my family and my culture being Scottish and Māori, and so it’s a part of me that I think it would be a loss to not talk about it.”
The album-making experience saw Hood tinkering away with musician, songwriter, and producer Jackson Phillips, with whom he worked on the majority of the album. Hood recalls, “I gave him 12 songs and pretty much said, like, ‘These are the songs I want to work on.’ And he said we should write as well. And so, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds really cool.’
“So, we went in together and we wrote. It opened another door into how I was seeing the music being played out, and it made me really excited, because it wasn’t how I once pictured it. And that was scary, because I kind of had to let go of what I wanted it to be because I had a pretty tight constraint on it, and I had to allow someone else in to tell my story, and I had to just fully trust that it was the right thing to do. It took a minute to get there, but once we developed a bond, it was, it was really easy to portray a lot of the stories and emotions that I wanted to say.”
The release of ORDER chaos ORDER corresponds with a string of intimate shows occurring in Melbourne and Sydney this week.
Stating that he “definitely” wants to take the album on the road for a tour and offer “performances in a different context,” Hood says of what fans can expect from his live shows: “I don’t really know, because I haven’t done one yet [laughs]. But hopefully it’s good; hopefully it’s a fun time, and hopefully we can cry and dance. Cry and dance seem to be the main thing.”
Calum Hood’s ORDER chaos ORDER will be released via EMI Music Australia on Friday, 13 June, with pre-orders available here.
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