In June, Aussie pop rock band 5 Seconds of Summer scored its third consecutive No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart with Youngblood. After earning its first Top 10 hit on the Hot 100 with the title track, the quartet is striving for similar success with “Valentine.” Produced by frequent Eminem and Dr. Dre collaborator Mike Elizondo, the song’s music video sits at over 30 million YouTube views in less than two months.
“Mike Elizondo had mixed guitars and hip-hop together pretty successfully in the past, and that’s exactly what we needed. We needed someone who approached music with a pretty wholesome kind of vision,” drummer Ashton Irwin tells Genius. “In his mind, it appeared that if you can’t play it, it won’t be on your record and I thought that was really useful for a band like us because we had to kind of expand the horizons: synthesizer-wise, playing keys, and doing things that we hadn’t usually done.”
5 Seconds of Summer recently sat down with Genius for the latest episode of Verified and broke down the track. Watch the group go line-for-line with “Valentine” in the video above, and check out past episodes, too.
