ORDER chaos ORDER Song Sorter

About ORDER chaos ORDER

ORDER chaos ORDER dropped on June 13, 2025, and it was Calum's first solo record after well over a decade in 5SOS. Ashton and Luke had both put out solo music in 2024, so it felt like his turn. He announced it in April along with the first single, Don't Forget You Love Me. He's said the title is the cycle of his life and his career, and that the chaos and the order are "neither good nor bad, just necessary."

It almost turned out completely different. He had a dozen home-studio demos he called "shitty demos," then he slid into the DMs of Jackson Phillips, who records as Day Wave. They talked over Zoom during COVID, and the first thing they wrote in a room together was I Wanted To Stay. After that he scrapped all but one of his old songs. Phillips produced most of the album, with David Burris on Sunsetter and All My Affection and the English team TMS on Don't Forget You Love Me. The sound is new wave, synth-pop and shoegaze - he's named Phoenix, M83 and The Radio Dept. as touchstones.

He's said it's about things he could never sing about in the band, like his upbringing and his family. I Wanted To Stay is about losing his dog in his early twenties. Bring tissues. Streetwise was inspired by the 1984 documentary of the same name, about kids living on the streets of Seattle. Three Of Swords is named after the tarot card, and if you know what that card means, you know how it sounds. Call Me When You Know Better he called "a reflection on mistakes made, perpetual regret and self pity."

It went straight to number one on the ARIA Albums Chart, with ONEFOUR - also from Mount Druitt - right behind at number two. It made the top 10 in Scotland and the top 20 in Germany and Poland, and Rolling Stone Australia put it on its list of the best Australian albums of 2025.

He's said Sunsetter is his favorite on the album, and he closed his first-ever solo show in Australia with it, at Nova's Red Room in Sydney two days before release. There's no deluxe edition, so the ten songs here are the whole album. It takes about two minutes. Once you're done, compare it with what the boys did on EVERYONE'S A STAR!, which dropped that November.