What Happened With 5 Seconds Of Summer in 2013
That was the year the band went from YouTube covers to selling out arenas without much in between. Calvin, Luke, Ashton, and Michael were all teenagers when they started posting videos, and by late 2013 they had a debut album, a global tour, and enough hype to fill venues that hadn't expected them. The self-titled album dropped in August 2013 and hit number one in Australia, the UK, and a few other markets. It sold around 45,000 copies in its first week in the US and eventually went platinum there. The song "She Looks So Perfect" came out later but the momentum was already set. If you are looking for official material from that year, the albums and EPs are the primary source. The self-titled album is on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music. The earlier EPs — the 2012 one and the 2013 extended play — are also on those platforms. For live footage, their VEVO channel on YouTube has the official performances from that era, including the BBC sessions and the MTV Woodies appearance. The documentary 5SOS: Live in London covers some of the touring that year. If you want high-quality downloads, the digital stores like iTunes and Amazon give you lossless or near-lossless files depending on your region. Streaming services compress the audio, so if you care about sound quality, skip the free tiers. I ran into a specific issue when I was trying to compile a setlist from their 2013 tour dates. The setlists vary between the Australian leg, the US leg, and the UK/European shows. The band played different bonus tracks in different markets. I found myself cross-referencing Setlist.fm with fan recordings from specific venues, and even then some nights are undocumented. My workaround was to pick a single tour leg and stick with one source — usually the US arena shows since those had the most complete recordings — rather than trying to merge everything into one master list. It gave me consistent data instead of a mess of conflicting track orders.
How the 2013 sound actually works
The production on the debut album was handled by John Feldmann, who has a very specific pop-punk template. He takes the raw energy of the guitars and vocals and runs it through a polished, radio-ready filter. The drums are tight, the synths are layered subtly underneath, and the vocal harmonies are stacked. It sounds like classic pop-punk but with modern mixing. The counter-intuitive thing most people miss is that the simplicity is deliberate. Those three-chord progressions aren't lazy writing — they are designed to leave room for the vocal melodies and the crowd singalong moments. If you try to over-produce those songs, they fall apart. The arrangements work because they are sparse underneath the polish. A common pitfall is assuming the band only played those songs live the same way they appear on the record. They don't. In 2013, their live shows often stripped back the synth layers and pushed the guitars harder. Ashton's vocals were more strained live than on the studio tracks, which is normal for a 19-year-old singing the same set night after night. If you are learning to play these songs, the studio versions will mislead you on tempo and dynamics. Use the live recordings as a reference for how the band actually structures the performance. The tempo is usually faster live, and the guitar tones are dirtier. The main limitation of this era is that the band was still figuring out their identity. Some tracks feel manufactured because they were. The songwriting was collaborative but heavily guided by Feldmann's hit-making approach. If you want something more raw, go back to their YouTube cover videos from 2011 and 2012. Those show the actual foundation before the album polish. The 2013 material is where they learned to balance authenticity with commercial viability, and that tension is audible throughout the record.
