The Singles Jukebox

It pains me that this did not score low enough to make some vampire-related “sucks” joke…

[Video]
[4.86]

Scott Mildenhall: McFly must be listening to this while surrounded by unsold copies of Above the Noise/counting their YouTube money, thinking “if only.” Yes, “Shine A Light” is a classic, but “Youngblood” is a much fuller realisation of their attempts at dark-but-not-dark electropop-rock, if not quite as full a realisation as “Kidz” by Take That. If anything, it’s the latter direction that sounds most promising. Forget being owned by One Direction, or having songs written with McFly, Busted, or Good Charlotte — what 5SOS need is to conjure up a ballad to match “Eight Letters” and a new, non-singing member for a solo that matches “Flowerbed.”
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Somewhere en route to turning into Fall Out Boy and turning into Peter Thiel, 5 Seconds of Summer decided to turn into “Some Girls” for a chorus. Maybe if they injected more it’d be the whole song.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Not from this performance.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: It sounds like music made by young men who spent too much time in clubs, and believed that inserting feelings into a dance beat is the same thing as making a dance song about feelings. 5SOS doesn’t wear its maturation well; “Youngblood” quivers but doesn’t ache. As fiercely as it tends to its portent, it can’t find the abyss in it, the point where all that feeling takes a life of its own, nor that point where the beat does too.
[4]

Anna Suiter: 5 Seconds of Summer are at their best and at their most endearing when they’re clever. “Youngblood” is not exactly endearing, but it is clever, at least in the way the chorus modifies itself from the first to the second part. From being “a dead man walking” to a “dead man crawling tonight,” it creates a full story just within the chorus itself. It’s too bad that makes the rest of the song feel a little superfluous.
[5]

Iain Mew: The throb and snap of the chorus and all the references to being a dead man point to melodrama, but it keeps crashing into a contrary urge towards slickness. Matching exaggerated blowouts and cool sounds should certainly be possible, but emo this politely restrained is self-negating.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Is there anybody left on earth who experiences those high-pitched, low-mixed fluttery whoos in the chorus as a thrilling or novel sound, or is it just meant to be a chronological marker: this was made in 2018?
[4]