5 Seconds Of Summer are in a continual line of fire, and talked even more about that in a recent feature with Billboard. The band compared being lumped in with boy bands to the expect of which Pete Wentz may have been the Justin Bieber of 2007, something that Wentz himself doesn’t quite agree with.

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The fact that 5SOS has been lumped in with boy bands past and present is more a reflection of its age and audience, not its music. “People get confused because we’re young and we have a female fan base,” says Irwin, whose fervent admirers freaked out on Twitter recently when he was photographed chatting with an unknown woman. “But so did Fall Out Boy. Pete Wentz was the Justin Bieber of 2007. Girls loved him, they obsessed over him.”

True, Wentz was praised for his “sexy ‘guy-liner’ ” in People’s Most Beautiful issue that year. But Fall Out Boy in its infancy was never in line to open for ’N Sync. The ascent of 5SOS to the world stage has been helped no doubt by the band’s association with Modest Management, which also guides One Direction. Clifford, however, is quick to point out the rock credentials of 1D’s manager, Richard Griffiths, who started out as a booking agent for AC/DC in the mid-1970s.