Is Australia Ready for a Boyband Revolution?

The Easybeats. Human Nature. Justice Crew. 5 Seconds Of Summer. Chase Atlantic.

Australia has produced some of the world’s most successful all-male pop groups, aka boybands, with some reaching global acclaim. Unfortunately, though, they’ve all been exceptions to the rule rather than heralding any sort of shift in Australia’s music culture.

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Boybands are usually associated with pop music, and Australia’s relationship with homegrown pop artists isn’t always celebratory. The splendour and scale that it takes for the roll-out of a successful pop outfit has never meshed snugly with a culture where aspirations are downplayed for fear of appearing too self-important. In Australian music circles, apathy sometimes feels like it reigns supreme.

The tide is slowly starting to turn, however. There are acts looking to shift the narrative by fully embracing the spectacle and emotional investment that comes with boyband fandom. It’s a stance that has always seemed at odds with Australia’s somewhat lackadaisical approach to music, but it’s also a position that propels a scene forward.

Someone that’s reached the highest heights of Australian music and beyond, thanks to his ambition – and that of his bandmates – is i.amsolo (aka Solo Tohi), former Justice Crew member and currently in-demand Australian hip-hop producer. As a founder of Justice Crew, Solo toured the world, pumping out hits while helping to further popularise dancing in Australia.

The crew’s first introduction to mainstream fame came when they entered the 2010 edition of Australia’s Got Talent. Popular amongst Australian audiences, and to overwhelming fanfare, they won. Following the win, the group got into recording music, signing a deal with Sony in August 2010. It was a deal that would spawn countless hits: their 2014 track “Que Sera” spent nine weeks at the top of the ARIA Singles charts (a record at the time). If you had ears around the time that Justice Crew were at their peak, then their music was inescapable.

Despite all this success, however, Solo recalls that music industry figures didn’t always show them respect. “I started to understand ‘oh, they’re not taking us seriously,’” they said. “We’re just making them money’. Like we’re just the generic group of guys who have a fan base of young girls or young people in general… They’re just trying to keep us in that box.” Their record-breaking success sits at odds with how they were often treated, which Solo tells VICE was because they were often seen as just another boyband signed to a major label. “I felt like we were being laughed at,” he said.

This realisation was a lightbulb moment for Solo, placing him on a pathway away from the polished pop music of Justice Crew and towards the world of hip-hop. He’s since gone onto work with the likes of CG Fez, Becca Hatch and most notably ONEFOUR.

To this day, Solo speaks glowingly about his time in Justice Crew, and his time in the legendary boyband has also opened up doors. He recalls ONEFOUR’s Spenny initially expressing his love for his work – not as a producer, but as a member of Justice Crew.

“One of the first sessions I had with ONEFOUR, I was sitting in the room, and Spenny came in,” Solo says. “He goes, ‘Oh, you’re the guy from Justice Crew!’ He was like ‘wow, I used to listen to your songs! Every time I used to be in detention I’d listen to ‘Que Sera’!’”

Much like ONEFOUR, pop trio Breakfast Road hail from Western Sydney. The three members – vocalist/producer Pete, vocalist/guitarist Briant and drummer/co-producer Amandip – started out as a high school rock band (the name Breakfast Road comes from the street of their high school), but have delved deeper into what it means to be a boyband over the last few years. They’re embracing the freedom that the label gives them. “When we call ourselves a boyband, and pop, we’re able to do so much more,” Pete explains.

As the band highlights to VICE, the term boyband only notionally ties you to the pop genre. A group can present themselves as a boyband, embrace boyband aesthetics and boyband formations, but their sound isn’t necessarily tied to pop music forever – which suits Breakfast Road’s aspirations just fine.

They’re actively pushing back against the apathy-adjacent attitudes that many bands seemingly adopt in order to fit in. “When you’re a band, especially in Australia, there’s expectations of you. You have to play certain instruments, you have to carry yourself a certain way,” Pete explains.

First embracing the moniker of a boyband around 2019/2020, the band’s music has delved into myriad genres, with boyband imagery tying the Breakfast Road universe together. Briant remarks, “It took a lot of us getting the messaging out there consistently as well. If you’re going to be a boyband, then you’ve got to be confident about it.”

While they might not consider themselves a boyband, Sydney pop duo Heartbreak in Blue’s imagery and music contains some of the grandeur and emotion present in the stories of the world’s biggest all-male acts. In reality, the members of the band – Mason Dane and Amorist – are two of Sydney’s brightest talents, but the band’s fabricated backstory tells the tale of a pop band that reached the loftiest heights in music and stayed there for over a decade.

According to their (fictional) origin story, Heartbreak in Blue made a name for themselves by prioritising sincerity above all else, pouring their hearts into stadium-sized ballads that talk about love and heartbreak. Mason and Amorist’s mutual love for 80s music brought them together, and they were so intent on embodying the 80s that they even considered adopting different stage names. In another reality, the members of Heartbreak in Blue could have been called Axel Steel and Rod Chambers.

For Mason, linking their music to the world of pop pizzazz and boyband-esque melodrama was a deliberate choice.

“That’s why we went with the name Heartbreak in Blue,” Mason reveals. “We wanted to make sure that there was still the same feel of melodrama that you hear in 80s music where people are talking about running to the ends of the earth to be with their love, or wanting to dance with their lover.”

To bring their debut project, Heartbreak In Blue: The Greatest Hits, to life, they wanted to create a world for Heartbreak in Blue, one that threw back to the 80s. To do this, they had to go all in on the rollout, fully committing to the bit.

As the narrative goes, the band formed in Sydney in 1982, before disbanding in 1999 following their last North American tour. Their pop prowess saw them rise to the top of the Billboard top 100 charts, staying there for over a year.

It’s at odds with what you might expect from Australian artists, but as Mason highlights, “A lot of people right now just take themselves far too seriously. We came out with a video of me saying I dated Madonna and yelling at Michael (Amorist) and treating him terribly, being a diva.”

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Part of the reason that pop remains a dirty word in many Australian circles is that it’s a genre that attracts a lot of love from young women, who are often dismissively described as “fangirls”.

Speak to some of the future titans of the Australian music industry, however, and you can start to unpack how their love of boybands like One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer helped foster their drive to work in music.

Sarah Davenport, Music Director at Melbourne community radio station SYN, recalls one such origin story. “Like many my age, I grew up as a huge One Direction fan, but it was also what got me interested in the music industry,” she says, pointing to a primary school assignment that involved researching a business. They chose to study Sony Music, One Direction’s record label.