YMMV / 5 Seconds of Summer

• Award Snub: 5SOS lost to Fifth Harmony in the end for the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards despite being the overwhelming favorite to win the category. And that's to say nothing about 5SOS being snubbed in 2016 in favor of 1D, despite the fact that the latter are on hiatus and the former are still active.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: As listed below, their song '18' randomly goes into a brief segment of Foo Fighters' 'Everlong.' It's a bit of mood whiplash, since the song was in a completely different tempo beforehand and goes back to how it was afterwards. It completely takes you out of the moment, especially if you've heard the other song beforehand.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
  • To put it simply, 5SOS fans do not like to hear the band's nickname pronounced "5 S.O.S". The correct pronunciation is "5 sauce."
  • Don't call Calum Asian. He is half Maori and half Scottish.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With Fifth Harmony. While the two groups were up against each other for an award, #keepcuttingashtonyouretrash started trended worldwide on Twitter.
  • Another prominent, if rather one sided one, comes from fans of Defend Pop Punk bands like The Wonder Years, The Story So Far, Knuckle Puck, Trophy Eyes and Trash Boat. These fans detest 5SOS for "ruining pop punk" by bucking the "slice of shitty life" style of the aforementioned bands for what they see as an unoriginal throwback to the late-2000s "neon pop-punk" sound, ala Forever the Sickest Kids. 5SOS's pre-"Youngblood" material could be more accurately described as a late 90s-mid 2000s pop punk throwback; at the time, the group incorporated musical and visual aspects of that era that "Defend Pop Punk" acts largely eschewed. The band only only really started majorly incorporating synths, a defining aspect of "neon pop punk", when they pivoted away from pop punk to electronic pop rock with Youngblood.
• Fan Myopia:
  • Part of the backlash against 5SOS from some Pop Punk fans comes from this. When you have 5SOS fans that are less familiar with rock and pop punk confusing their cover of Green Day's 'American Idiot' as an original song, there's bound to be some rustled jimmies. There's also a sizable amount of these pop punk fans angry about 5SOS fans calling the band things like "the next blink-182". These comments are either made by a very small amount of misguided 5SOS fans, entirely made up, or obvious troll fodder, but that doesn't stop that segment of pop punk fans from getting very, very angry about it.
  • There's additional backlash from pop punk fans who recognized some of their earlier material as sounding eerily similar to other ones from years before, which will get outright denials or actual backed up defenses based on 5SOS fan familiarity on said songs. Either they're not going to be as easy to defend (like other examples in the Suspiciously Similar Song section) or they actually can be explained by other means ("She's Kind Of Hot" sounds like My Chemical Romance's Teenagers...on purpose. is due to Benji Madden's suggestion of a 12-Bar Blues riff, a incredibly common pop music cord progression that also features on Teenagers. The ubiquity was not enough to keep people from claiming that 5SOS "admitted to ripping off My Chem", which is likely why the admission of influence was removed from the Fuse article it was first mentioned in.)
  • One main argument as to why 5 Seconds of Summer deserved the success they got with their earlier material is because of the fact that they dropped out of school to tour with One Direction not knowing what was going to happen next and not knowing if they were going to fail or succeed. The counter-counterpoint to that was that 5SOS' pop rock style wasn't that far removed from 1D and that combined with their looks would already make them more commercially viable from the get go, even without the 1D bump.^note For comparison, it took Green Day three albums and a few EPs over a four-year period (plus, Billie Joe and Mike quit after Armstrong turned 18, several months shy of graduating, making 5SOS's story less unique) to reach their initial big success in the 90s, and another ten to match their previous success after years of waning interest by the public. All Time Low started producing music while in high school and started touring and producing more right out of high school. At [5SOS]' pop punk peak in 2015, Waterparks only just got signed to an indie label after under half a decade's worth of work building their audience and self-releasing EPs. 5 Seconds of Summer would likely be in a similar position to these bands were it not for the Colbert Bump from One Direction. (It should be noted that 5SOS is friends with both All Time Low and Waterparks. Alex Gaskarth of ATL helped them write some of their songs, and Awsten Knight of Waterparks joined them on stage for a 2018 show in Houston.)
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With One Direction, especially outside Australia where most 5SOS fans are Directioners who haven't abandoned 1D despite their newfound love for 5SOS. Some level of beef still occurs, though most fans don't get into it.
  • Same goes with British pop rock act The Vamps.
  • Ironically given the above entries, there's a fairly large number of Fall Out Boy fans who also like them.
  • Aside from some fans who see Waterparks as less "poppy" comparatively to 5SOS, there's additional friendly fandom overlap with Waterparks, especially as frontman Awsten Knight is a huge fan of the band.
• Follow the Leader: It's hard to see McBusted touring with One Direction as an attempt to capture some of the buzz that 5SOS got when they toured with 1D before.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Prior to 5SOS, an Australian Pop Punk/Pop Rock band having international success was virtually unheard of. To those that consider them a boy band, they're seen as the only foreign one besides One Direction (and outside of the K-pop realm) to have made it big in America.
• Growing the Beard: Youngblood was seen by critics and fans as a natural transition of their sound as a response to the current pop scene with more mature lyrics. The album was also the first not to feature the production involvement of John Feldy and the Madden Brothers, who played a major role in their early major label career.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A big part of the criticism aimed at their earlier material was that it sounds far too much like their influences (All Time Low, Fall Out Boy, Green Day, etc) without doing a lot to differentiate themselves from those groups, especially when some songs sound way too similar. While their throwback sound was a novelty on pop radio in the 2010s and to an audience that is largely ignorant to the influences, others with more familiarity with the kind of music they were making would reasonably call foul. These complaints are largely inapplicable due to their genre shift towards more electronic pop rock as of Youngblood.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many 5SOS fans weren't pleased about 5SOS opening for The Chainsmokers on their World War Joy tour, but still chose to support the band by going to the shows. At least one show on the tour had a substantial amount of people walking out of the arena moments after 5SOS finished playing.
• Older Than They Think: Wait, people aren't sure if 5SOS is a pop punk band or a boy band? Are we talking about McBusted? Furthermore, Fall Out Boy and blink-182, two of 5SOS' talked about influences, also had "boy band" and "not punk enough" thrown at them back in the day, despite both bands having a stronger punk pedigree than 5SOS. Admittedly, 5SOS' production style (including multiple songwriters outside of the band and multiple vocalists in said band) and marketing of their first two releases under Capital Records errs closer to that of a boy band. Even after they shifted into pop rock, 5SOS5 was notable for being the first album they wrote and produced mostly by themselves. However, Fall Out Boy and blink-182 were also inadvertently marketed in ways appealing to teenage girls by third parties back at the height of their popularity and both bands, to varying extents and far more recently for blink-182, have embraced pop production and conventions. Like 5SOS, Fall Out Boy aren't above bringing in outside co-writers.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • With 1D previously owning a large stake in the group and going on hiatus in 2016, many who consider 5SOS a boy band thought them to be the only currently active and internationally popular Western boy band left standing.
  • It could be argued that 5SOS' initial success with radio friendly 90s-2000s inspired pop punk in the 2010s helped set the stage for Machine Gun Kelly to properly bring it back to the mainstream in the 2020s. Like 5SOS,MGK is another artist with connections to the alt "scene" but was never truly a part of it who gained massive criticism for derivatives and taking "shortcuts" to popularity. Both acts also courted a loyal fanbase through their early use of social media.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Examples include "Social Casualty" having an extremely similar instrumental to Fall Out Boy's "Sugar, We're Goin' Down" mixed with All Time Low's "Me Without You" and "18" randomly using part of the instrumental to Foo Fighters' "Everlong" at 1:54. This even got so bad that their lawyers advised them to give writer credits to the band members of Duran Duran on the song "Hey Everybody!" due to it it having the exact same rhythm as "Hungry Like the Wolf."
• Signature Song: "She Looks So Perfect" and "Youngblood", the latter of which racked up a billion streams on Spotify.

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