When Luke Hemmings set out to write his new EP boy, he was chasing something specific. In session with songwriting partner Sammy Witte, they called it “the ache.” “It’s difficult to get across in words,” Luke explains. “I just know there’s a feeling that I get; there’s an ache. That seems to be the feeling I come back to.”

Luke is adept at capturing feelings and distilling them into music. As the lead vocalist of 5 Seconds of Summer, Luke has sold millions of records, toured the globe numerous times, accumulated billions of streams, and become one of Australia’s most successful musical exports. boy, meanwhile, sees him flex his innate abilities as a songwriter to carve out a unique space as an artist in his own right.

The EP began to materialise while 5SOS were on the road in 2021. While travelling with the band, Luke found himself drawing parallels between his feelings of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic and the constant movement of touring. “Obviously in Covid, it was very isolated at home, very lonely, and a weird time for everyone,” he explains. “But as I was on the road and in hotel rooms and on tour buses and on planes, I started having that same sort of existential and melancholic feeling. I was tapping into that but from a different perspective. Instead of being at home on your own watching whatever was happening to the world during Covid, I was watching through a hotel room window or walking around a different city every day.”

It was similar feelings that informed Luke’s debut solo album, When Facing the Things We Turn Away From. However, for this new project, he “wanted to push it further lyrically and sonically.” With sketches of songs itching to come together, Luke relocated to New York (“What’s the most feeling lonely but surrounded by a bunch of people place? New York,” he says) to record with Witte.

The end result of their time together is boy. Inspired by the likes of LCD Soundsystem, My Bloody Valentine, The Verve, and Cocteau Twins, it’s a concise EP, each song offering a new sense of maturity, growth, and humanity. “I was definitely writing about getting to your late twenties and trying to sum up that feeling where you have everything in front of you but everything is starting to feel real,” Luke explains. “I was also writing about wanting to go home. I was having a hard time on tour and I was on a lot of vocal rest from the shows. I felt very isolated, and I was going through some stuff personally. It was a weird headspace.”

You get a sense of this from the EP opener “I’m Still Your Boy.” Launching with the hazy strum of an acoustic guitar and lashings of stacked vocal tracks, the production ebbs outwards, contracting for the pre-chorus before exploding out on the chorus, Luke repeating the phrase: “I’m still your boy.” Lyrically, the track explores the liminal space between youth and adulthood, Luke still grasping hold of his boyhood. “The verses are very specific,” he says of the track, “but I’ve been very interested in choruses. On my first album, I had a tendency to write very complex lyrics where I’m beating around the bush a bit. It’s a weak spot for me. So I wanted to have parts of my songs that were just one line where I could get across the most emotion in fewer words.”

Exploring with new ways to draw out emotional was also integral to “Shakes.” Written from different perspectives, each one seeped in loneliness and the craving for connection, Luke and Witte experimented with pitching Luke’s voice to become inhuman in order to pull “more emotion out of it.” Likewise, on the gorgeous “Close Enough to Feel You,” which features guest vocals from Luke’s wife, musician Sierra Deaton, Luke’s voice is mutated, hovering over guitars that shimmer like sunlight dappled on water.

In fact, conjuring emotions is something that Luke leans into wholeheartedly on boy. The dreamy soundscape of “Benny”, for example, is an ode to family, but one that aches with the loss of a life sometimes lived on their periphery. That feeling reaches out into the twilight hues of “Close My Eyes,” its propulsive rhythm driving the neon-flecked production forward like a long-exposure photo of a highway. “It’s about acceptance,” Luke says. “It’s acceptance of where I am in this moment and about how I don’t want to stay in this limbo. I want to be brave enough to step through to the next chapter.”

A vision of this new phase of life materializes on “Garden Life,” a breezy late-summer song that extols the domesticity and finds meaning in life’s more mundane moments, Luke musing: “I feel most alive/Staring out your window/It’s a garden life.” “I wrote it more like a poem than any of the other songs and then made a melody around it,” he recalls, “and you can hear that because it’s a bit nonsensical and a bit surreal. But yeah, it puts me at home for sure.”

There’s yearning for domestic bliss on album closer “Promises,” too, a song that’s flush with love but which doesn’t shy away from the realities of life in Hollywood as Luke sings: “I wasn’t always a cynic, it’s just I’ve been bought and sold.” “My wife and I are both products of the music industry,” he says of the lyrics. “And I don’t want it to come across as complaining, when you’re young and your whole self-worth is wrapped up in how well a project does, it takes a mental toll. I think it can put me in a dreary, L.A. drunken haze, I suppose. And that song is about finding a kindred spirit.”

Given the rich sonic textures and the ambient mood of the record, Luke is eager to perform the songs in a live setting, something he says he’s nervous but excited about. But as boy demonstrates, the 27-year-old is entering a new period of his life, one in which stepping out of your comfort zone leads to new creative and personal revelations. “A big thing I discovered in the last few years is that I’m a very emotional person,” he admits. “It sounds like a silly thing to say, but it’s something that for my whole life I’ve struggled to be aware of. I don’t know that I would’ve got there without writing these songs.”