Michael Clifford is doing the solo-album tightrope walk with the grin of a man who knows the net is still 5 Seconds of Summer. “I don’t even know who I am,” he says, cheerfully chaotic. “I’m just flying and flailing through the universe like, ‘help me.’” It’s not a crisis so much as a mission statement: Side quests, not severance.
Fatherhood didn’t turn the record into lullabies; it detonated his perspective. “It was the biggest thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “I’d finished some songs before I was a dad, then I escaped drowning and realized, ‘this doesn’t represent who I am now.’” He scrapped half the tracks, rewired the rest, and chased that kid-like voltage you only get the first time you touch the stove. “Watching my daughter discover everything unjaded me. I wanted people to hear this and feel like, ‘wow, first time I’m discovering something.’”
Don’t call it a nostalgia play. “The only thing I knew I didn’t want was a nostalgia album,” Clifford says. “Give you the feeling of it? Sure. But I want you to say, ‘damn, this is totally new.’ My DNA is emo—it lives in my blood—but I’m dabbling everywhere.” He’s allergic to the concept of “solo identity,” which is probably why this one feels like one. “When the band’s together, it’s a blockbuster. Alone, I’m trying weird indies.”
Case in point: “Kill Me For Always,” the Porter-blessed cut where he deletes the heartbeat. “There are no drums,” he grins. “Porter’s my favorite artist of all time, and even he was like, ‘Is there a beat?’ I told him, ‘I don’t think this one has drums.’ It’s fully produced, all the bells and whistles—just missing the foundation on purpose. I want you to wonder, ‘why didn’t they add drums?’ Then realize that’s the point.”
The lyrics keep nudging the camera. He fourth-walls shamelessly—names, specifics, the backstage chatter bleeding into the hook. “What’s fun is saying the thing only I can say,” he explains. “If you’re the guy who caught fire with the colored hair in the band about underwear, nobody else can sing that.” Specific is universal, he argues, and he’s right; the bridge lands because it isn’t sanded down.
He’ll also tell you he’s a menace to himself in the studio. “I’m a chronic overthinker,” he says. “I’ll sit there asking if a snare represents me. Is it a ‘cl’ or a ‘duh’?” Deadlines saved him. “A painting’s never done, it’s just taken away from you—I feel that with every song. Someone needed them, so I had to stop touching them.”
Live, the terror is part of the show. “I’m horrified,” he laughs. “I want to walk onstage and ask, ‘Can everyone turn around?’ Don’t even look at me. Go on your phone.” He’s not using the solo set as a 5SOS jukebox, either. “If you want to hear a 5SOS song, come to a 5SOS show,” he says. Flip side? The band could fold solo moments into the mothership. “That makes more sense. Or we do a five-hour show and play everything. Take that, Taylor.”
The closer “Eclipse” is chaotic by design—parenting as arrangement. “You don’t know the structure,” he says. “It might be loud noise out of nowhere, or silence. The ending breakdown is like ten seconds and that’s the climax. It’s unorthodox on purpose because parenting is fucking insane.”
Nothing here screams reinvention; it mutters revelation. New tricks, old wiring. “Side quest” is the right phrase—expansive but not precious, intimate without confessionals. “This is just fun,” he says. “I love the songs. I love the people I worked with. I wanted it to feel new.” Mission accomplished, snare neuroses and all.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
