Last Friday they released a new album called DNA, their first in five and a half years, which Billboard projects will debut at #1 with more than 200,000 equivalent album units. That song, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” only made it up to #63, but I heard it on the radio with my own ears, the first time I consciously remember hearing a new Backstreet Boys song in the wild since high school (Westerville North class of ’02, baby). Although that didn’t pan out, last year they landed a single on the Hot 100 for the first time in 11 years. Two years ago, BSB collaborated with Florida Georgia Line in hopes of scoring one of FGL’s patented pop-country crossover hits. Some of them starred in a zombie western from the makers of Sharknado alongside members of NSYNC.
They played arenas around the world as part of nostalgic package tours with the likes of New Kids On The Block. The group has been slowly making a comeback over the course of this decade. Their music continued to be gobbled up by core fans all throughout the aughts, but their singles kept charting lower and lower until they weren’t charting at all, and their album sales dwindled such that even going Gold now seemed like a reach. And then, along with every other male star from their era not named Justin Timberlake, the Boys saw diminishing commercial returns in the years following Y2K. Weirdly, they never landed a #1 hit on the Hot 100 - not even “I Want It That Way,” which only made it to #6(?!) - but they did tally six top 10 singles and sent video after video to the top of TRL. Millennium went Diamond, which means it surpassed 10 million copies in the US alone, and then it went Platinum three more times. Two #1 albums, 1999’s Millennium and 2000’s Black & Blue, moved 30 million and 24 million copies worldwide respectively. At the turn of the millennium, they rivaled NSYNC at the forefront of a thriving teen-pop scene.
Two decades later, Backstreet really is back, not as werewolves or vampires or mummies but possibly as zombies, their once-dead career now reanimated.
If you were alive that year, you’ve certainly heard the song: “Everybody! Yeah! Rock your body right! Backstreet’s back, alright!” If you watched MTV at all at the dawn of the TRL era, you remember this video. The boys in the band appear in costume as various kinds of ghoulish creatures. Reluctantly, they decide to stay the night, after which “Thriller”-style horror hijinks ensue. In the Backstreet Boys’ video for 1998 mega-hit “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” the group’s tour bus breaks down outside what turns out to be a haunted house.
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