#official efyts post

[edge-oftheworld]

the evolution from 'colourblind' being mentioned twice in CALM and the only colours being mentioned being the red of the desert, blue, black and white, to 5SOS5 and all of the colours it encapsulates, gold (inside, and shining), silver (linings and screen), violet sounds, cocaine white on a wedding dress, red of the train line, caramel, mentions of fire and sun (bleeding sun, staring at the sunshine, caving in, SUNRISE IN SYDNEY THAT'S BURNING FOR DAYS), diamond tears, yes there's 'blacking out in my room' but also the darkness fading out into gold at the start of the album

[faithfromanewperspective]

drown out the sadness in the swimming pool. no, not like you're probably thinking. i mean in every lap of breast stroke on a cold autumn afternoon, pausing to rescue a toad that fell in knowing my guinea fowl will probably eat it later, its slimy feet on my bare hand. i'd do more laps usually, but this time, i'm glad i made it into the cold leafy water and maybe that's enough. something in me is tired, and it's not my muscles: they could go on for days, and I know that. I used to run for miles every single day, now it's hard to fit more than the essentials into life and i don't know if resting is making it better or worse, feeling like i'm falling behind, out of control. but i need to rest in order that it doesn't get any worse. i'm tired of carrying everything for everyone, my life being a constant puzzle of how is everyone doing emotionally which, while I enjoy it, it would be nice to just be able to relax for a bit. someone actually taking care of me for once in a way that isn't condescending or some sort of power move against me or making me feel like i have to manage their levels of commitment to things in their life they'll leave behind. overwhelming me. overwhelming them. i don't want to be cared for like that. i just want collaboration. more satisfaction. to make something i can be proud of but i'm dragging my limbs through things i used to enjoy. it's okay if i'm feeling a bit fuzzy about making this decision. it's not my always, it won't be, i keep telling myself, but when things change but don't get any better something has to change in order to manage this properly. but what can? i'll let go of all these unfinished projects, this chaos, when i've finished them. if i make it to that point. i'll celebrate and move on but i'll probably miss it, miss what it could've been if i could've enjoyed it and not known it'd be taken from me if i gave in to the pressures to have a career. but i also know i'd be bored without it. hopeless in the face of the world. restless ideas running though my head--i feel like i've had too many. i have to sit down because they take up everything in me just to store in my head; but how can i get them out into reality if i can't move to make them happen? i'm like my phone, unable to back up onto my hard drive because so many photos just make it crash. maybe it's time to think of a new way of doing it. but for the first time in my life i'm out of ideas. they've been spent elsewhere. there are barriers to getting everything i need i can't cross until i have what's on the other side of the barrier. it's like i'm solving a puzzle blind. maybe this will be the thing i need to get over it, but then it doesn't last and all i can think of is i'm not the only one who's feeling like this. i can sit in it. know that i'm not alone. i don't even know what the next thing in front of me is, but i'll try something, hope that it works.

[edge-oftheworld]

I think what intrigues me the most about CALM as an album is that it feels like such a pivotal point, like it’s on the precipice of something. and in their story it really is. it’s a late coming of age album, it includes reflection and self discovery, and a whole lot of frustration. a desperation that’s been burnt and jaded and clings a bit too hard to whoever has been there and a gets them through hurt and suffering that’s lasted far too long. doing adult things and making them toxic. broken relationships where you’ve been hurt and where you’re the one who’s hurt the one you love. these things are all juxtaposed together with a very cohesive sound, they’re good at cohesive sounds, and it really paints a picture of being stuck there in the moment, feeling stuck and hopeless, unable to look around and see what as a listener you can see: that you’re almost there. the light at the end of the tunnel is closer than you could ever dream. songs of a mature survivor’s hope. pure joy once again, we both got introduced to the term ‘native of mine’ and we got to see the power of being understood and understanding someone and creating art with them. the hurricane didn’t last forever. and yet the album isn’t arranged to take you there in that order, it just is all put together in a real way because that’s what real life is. it gets better because you learn to do the work and when you do, you realise it’s easier than you think. doable.

[edge-oftheworld]

new 5sos fans: 5sos5 is actually a really sad album--

old fans who saw the whole sgfg->youngblood->calm->superbloom and wfttwtaf and 2011:

old fans: well actually--

*processing*

old fans: yeah you're right it is let me just go cry about the last decade somewhere

[edge-oftheworld]

you’re allowed to be dumb and passionate. you’re allowed to be overdramatic and drenched in your pain and feel the urge to blame those who stole your youth without meaning to and never figured out how to communicate hope to you. you’re allowed to cry about it. you’re allowed to get high just to feel alive. you’re allowed to miss the signs someone wanted to run and ask for help making sense of it. you’re allowed to keep driving to the edge til you get this right; you’re doing your best and that is the best you can do. it’s okay that when they wish you well after you fucked up you kinda want to die, but in the end you’ll still pay again to keep from stopping it now. apologising to yourself for breaking plans on a Sunday to rest and treating your mind like an ashtray, it’s okay that you’re never one to change and you’re scared to find a piece of peace of mind. to let your love go and fall apart destructively like a landslide and kiss one last goodnight because your heaven ain’t the same. you realised that when you’re cleaning up and there’s bleach in the hallways you can start over, you’re bleaching your hair as a way of figuring out how to go on without someone, it’s baby steps after you burnt the city without warning reaching out for someone’s help. after you took the L and you won’t go home you realise that you still love the heat and the noise and feeling like a tiger in a circus ring again and you still think about the times we were heavy and all your friends are up on mars you’re travelling. after that city broke your heart and you needed someone to pick you up so you don’t have to play pretend and you are human once again and you’re still trying to find the city with the brightest lights. I love to love you for god’s sake. when you pull through yes I’ll feel the same, with a knife inside your heart I feel it too but you kiss away the pain and that’s it, our silver linings, gold and shining, that’s what you do when you love somebody. young man look in the mirror, lights will guide you so run like hell 🤍❤️‍🩹🤍

[edge-oftheworld]

had a massive realisation last night. easy for you to say is an anger song

[edge-oftheworld]

every time I get out the instruments to try play/sing easy for you to say I’m like. they literally had no reason to put so many octaves in there

[edge-oftheworld]

thinking about the way when i interact with fellow aussies on here I see so much disappointment about how they didn't come here on their last tour. how sydney 5sos fans are a different brand of human i'm not really sure how to describe (we all freaked out when we went to the same concert lauren was at for example). thinking about how the australian leg of take my hand tour felt like it was almost its own thing, sandwiched between the gap after the bulk of the tour before it and that short gap before they announced the most recent tour after it--almost as if it was meant to bridge both of those tours. how they played in newcastle and on the gold coast and it wasn't quite cairns or coffs but it was a bit more than your state capitals headline tour. how, with the exception of the big four, we often don't realise how small our cities are on a global scale. there are only 27 million of us on this desert island.

thinking about how they wrote easy for you to say and had to perform it on tour six months before its actual release, it was so important to this setlist, to the vibe, and how it's about nostalgia and missing sydney and they finished the tour in sydney and it makes me wonder, i can kind of guess when the song means the same thing to me, how much it hurts to be able to perform here and yet not be able to stay for longer than a holiday. and yet they do do that for us, put on shows about as regularly as any other artist does. even if they didn't play splendour in the grass. or falls festival. even if it's been four years since fire fight australia, it was only months ago sierra was promoting beyond blue as a charity to donate to. friends of friends did some fundraiser for a youth centre in blacktown: maybe I have to look to see it, but I can see the impact they've left.

and then I see how happy they all seem to look when they've gotten a chance to hang out in australia. ashton covering songs in the heat. calum obviously having a blast. luke dropping sydney pics that were assumedly from before it got really hot, looking carefree, a familiar skyline and familiar urban graffiti. the way when michael arrived in perth for the first time after lockdown he simply had to tell us all right away. and i've always kind of seen them coming back here for good? heck, joel madden even assumed right on his podcast some of them might have already. the way ashton doesn't have a dog in the states, and how i've always seen him with an aussie. the way luke integrates seamlessly into the life and culture of the inner west area; and calum carries blue mountains vibes with him wherever he goes, as michael does with the sydney pop punk scene. we know brandy and sierra at least love australia--i was actually fangirling about sierra in their comments with the veronicas just the other day (bless them for deciding my comment was something that needed to replying to). while crystal does have a massive group of usamerican friends and family I can see her enjoying the vegan places in melbourne and brisbane (they're coming to sydney too. the inner west and parts of the north side are almost there) and maybe being a little more hopeful about politics. I can also see it being a really healthy place to raise lua.

maybe it's the hopefulness of an urban designer who sees the impact of art and culture and having people around who create for a living on our cities, but maybe I see myself in 20 years bringing my kids to see them play and being able to tell the story of a series of songs (red desert, efyts, whatever is next in the theme in the works for 5sos6 as well as the solo stuff like a lot of wfttwtaf and boy) and how they figured out what we all have to, how to find and create a place that's home to you--because it's actually a pretty likely event. and i love seeing the evolution from the 'let's get out' / 'worked every weekend just to get out of town' vibe of self titled and sgfg to now. I really do want them all to feel like they can relax now after so many years of working and depriving themselves of the love that comes from belonging (I do feel like we've heard more about it from luke and ash specifically) and I also get the subtle vibes of where that might happen. and how much it might hurt when they don't get to have that. what did they do for aussies? gave us hope that we could make it, in whatever we want to do and whatever success means for us. maybe it's just me though. for now. maybe i've got the expectations of someone who grew up unable to afford things like concerts mixed with the anticipation for this june. I hope i'm not projecting, but also, the empathy I feel when I see myself in someone is usually spot on.

so idk. one day i'm gonna design some really classy public housing made to unfuck the status quo and i'm gonna raise money to build it and sierra will write a song and say she's doing a donation to this charity in australia doing things about homelessness and the class divide and it's gonna help me fund it. that's just one option of something i can see going down that's not completely unrealistic if very very optimistic but it's how i live my life. but i'll go to a 5sos concert eventually. i'll play their songs i've arranged with an orchestra one day too and we'll do it impressively, noticeably. i don't really know what else i'm supposed to expect? I know my experience is worlds away from many people's. but these guys inspire me to create and I don't really need anything else to do that.

[edge-oftheworld]

are we gonna talk about her? I feel it in moments a semblance of free/between all the gasping I finally breathe/so I hold on so tightly in moments I see/someone with striking resemblance to me/a darkness that holds me and loves when I bleed/it locks all the doors and then hides all the keys/wish someone had told me what I couldn’t see/a glimmer of hope that was staring at me? are we gonna talk about that lyrical perfection and how it just fits with the repetitive melody of the verses and whether ‘someone with striking resemblance to me’ refers to the depression that convinces you it’s yourself or this new you living in the time that you breathe a bit easier and follow that hope like a lifeline it makes sense? and how it fills in perfectly the experience behind missing the sunrise in Sydney and regretting your youth and being stuck in your ways and drenched in your pain?

are we gonna talk about the simple yet profound imagery of feeling trapped and held by darkness, as if depression is a creature that celebrates at your bleeding and is going around locking doors and hiding keys like the frustration alone when you lock yourself out is bad enough but to have this creature here so intimately actively enjoying it while you’re bleeding and all you can do is hold on to the rare moments it’s not suffocating you and you can just breathe for a little bit, this thing we need to do to stay alive, that feels so rare, and yet you’re still saying ‘I wish someone told me there was hope staring right at me’ not intervene? get this thing off of you and out of your life? a glimmer of hope isn’t much but it’s everything isn’t it? I say sometimes how the thing that unites us across socioeconomic divides maybe the most is things like depression. and yes it’s an illness this isn’t meant to be normal I’m not saying that! but we relate to easy for you to say don’t we? we relate to feeling hopeless and trapped and frustrated and you don’t need to be a certain kind of person to feel that, it’s the nature of the curse, but also the blessing that we need no other qualifications to sit together in that. we don’t even need to all miss Sydney or anywhere.

and it’s such a reflective monologue of a song, such an assertion of truth on the other side of lies, lies about being fine, the kind of thing we tell every day because we’re expected to to get through this world, we’re so often not only suffering but expected to have that solidarity in it taken away so that every person thinks it’s only them. we’re meant to lie as we look you in the eyes as if that piece of peace of mind is something we not only aren’t scared of but have found and don’t you see it? the harm that lying does when there’s no one to tell you about the glimmer of hope staring at you when you just lie to them about why you’re overdramatic and drenched in your pain and let them just think you’re headstrong and stubborn and stuck in your ways because that’s all there is to it, you’re just kind of a dick, not that you’re struggling to breathe every day and get through this excruciatingly painful reality? isn’t that the tragedy of this song? it’s easy for you to say because you have no clue what I’m going through. it’s easy for you

[edge-oftheworld]

i feel like i've finally gotten my head around this fandom. realising how big it really is, a real fucking legacy, like that global family they talk about in the show. and to think i was just not alloheterosexual enough to ever feel comfortable in fandom spaces for anything that vaguely resembles a 'boyband' for the last decade or so. like no i'm not in anyone's lane. i'm just an artist and a visionary who gets real inspired by some dudes from my hometown and is searching for those precious people who i would call 'native of mine'

[edge-oftheworld]

suburban legends, national treasures. there’s a walk celebrating the bee gees on the redcliffe peninsula in queensland and I happen to be in sydney this week at the same time as calum and ash and I had ideas, I always have ideas, budding urban designer who wants to tattoo love into my homeland by designing societies and public spaces that bring us together and celebrate who we are collectively. I realised I could do a 5sos inspired proposal up especially while the area of sydney they’re from is on the cusp of a lot of development in a good way I guess and like always from me it’s a gift of love to the community as a whole and incorporates insight from both the early songs that view those suburbs in an apocalyptic light and the later ones that look on it more fondly and celebrate connection and nostalgia. what if we made growing up there easier? what if I was able to give this gift to the community of a band who have given me songs that have held me through so much?

[edge-oftheworld]

i'm looking at the Indigenous history of Sydney as part of uni, and actually, realising how much easy for you to say fits the nostalgia/solastalgia of pre-colonial, pre urbanised country. like it genuinely fits SO WELL. every single line from the misunderstanding and often invisible struggle to 'I'll try and change my ways' (to function within a colonial system, how much of the blame is put on the individual) to the refrain of 'easy for you to say, harder for me to take' to both verses--like the self-deprecating 'i'm headstrong and stubborn and stuck in my ways' which people see and it's easy to internalise, to the 'youth that was stolen and filled with mistakes' which hits so much harder if it's referring to something like the Stolen Generation, still concluding 'i'm overdramatic and drenched in my pain', living in the moments where 'between all the gasping i finally breathe' (is that the person? the land? does it matter?) with 'a darkness that holds me and loves when I bleed, it locks all the doors and it hides all the keys' (oppression and generational trauma do that!) and moving forward to 'what I couldn't see, a glimmer of hope that was staring at me'

[edge-oftheworld]

greater 5sos songs mentioning sunrises:

tomorrow never dies

comedown

efyts

(with a special mention to sunshine for not saying it but implying it)

this is some real shut my eyes right at 17 open eyes right at 23 shit

[edge-oftheworld]

diamonds is for veterans of The Plague who are only in their 20s but sound like old grumps every time R U OK day rolls around. for anyone who’s suffered with something so chronically they have no idea how bad is bad that requires getting help, it’s just normal, it probably is way worse than anyone ever realises but when suffering is your norm you’re not really calibrated to the ‘normal amount of pain is zero’ are you? it’s for when you don’t really believe it’ll ever get better and you know you can’t last like this but you kind of go on with your day to day life because there’s no point putting life on hold til you feel better. it’s for those who tell jokes that aren’t even that dark and everyone looks at you with concern. for when you’ve come back to yourself after being manic or high and have to kind of guess at the gaps in your memory and not think too hard about them. it’s for when you catch yourself missing that version of you who connected with others so easily before you got burnt out and just never recovered the energy in any way that’s conducive to normal interpersonal behaviour. you’re tired, you’re always tired, and sometimes you remember that bright-eyed youth you once were but most of the time you have no idea how you’d explain what you’re going through if you were to get help. it’s just normal. all of this is so, so drudgingly normal it seems ludicrous to even imagine there’s something better that might exist for anyone. surely they’re all pretending? surely there are people struggling much more than you, you see them, you kind of feel numb to it all, you go on with your day. you don’t think about the future and you try not to think about the past. not to think about the fact that you don’t really remember it at all. you forget you need to eat, and then you don’t even bother to eat when you do remember. you think maybe you’re just not worth that effort, you’re not worth good things, be it sustenance or help to feel better. there is no concept of better.

but you surprise yourself sometimes. you have a birthday and think, have I really lived for all of these years? you realised you survived that hard time and you look back on it. yes I’m proud. that was brutal, you had no idea in the moment when you were stuck in the middle of it and you’ll say the same about now in a few years time. you realise that somewhere in the haze of it all while you were suffering you’ve done things you’re proud of. set yourself up in ways that you can have the autonomy you need, the gender, the life, the legacy. you don’t remember half of it but for a moment it doesn’t matter, you did something, not much but it’s something, if you’re honest you never saw yourself where you are today and the sheer unexpectedness of it against your low expectations brings you a rush of pride. joy. satisfaction. peace. you can’t believe you went through all that, maybe you can give yourself a hug and an extra treat that you really needed all those years ago. when you probably wouldn’t have felt it as fully as you do now. a warm meal. a bit of free time to journal in the light of those fancy candles you were saving for the day you felt like doing more than the bare minimum. accept something nice from someone. have a good cry. realise just how far your calibration for what counts as normal is off what is actually normal. connect with someone who helps you see that clearly. decide you’ll make it another year, and you’ll make this year something worthwhile for once. a little better than the last one. it won’t ever be perfect, you know, you won’t ever be completely free from this suffering but even in the midst of it you can ease the pain, but you’re good at appreciating the little things after all you’ve been through and you realise, you’re never too deep in to take a step towards the light.

[edge-oftheworld]

actually so empowering to just say ‘I’m overdramatic and drenched in my pain’

[edge-oftheworld]

sunrise in sydney that's burning for days? sunrise? start of day? start of life? childhood? childhood in sydney that just. burns in your memories and lights up the rest of your life even years down the line?