Backstreet Boys

Backstreet Boys came together in Orlando in 1993: Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, AJ McLean and the cousins Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson, five voices drilled to lock together tight enough to make a teenage arena scream on cue. Their self-titled debut in 1996 lit the fuse, Backstreet's Back followed in 1997, and "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" turned into a dance-floor roll call.

Millennium, in 1999, was the coronation. "I Want It That Way" is a gleaming, heartsick pop ballad, all hushed verses and a chorus built to be sung back by a stadium, and it carried the album around the world. Millennium and the group's self-titled US album both went diamond. Black & Blue came next, then a hits set, a break, and the comeback Never Gone in 2005.

Richardson left after the tour that followed and the other four made Unbreakable and This Is Us as a quartet, before he returned in 2012. They went independent for In a World Like This, and DNA, in 2019, debuted at number one; no boy band had managed a chart-topping album in the US for three decades before that. With more than 150 million records sold, no boy band has sold more. They have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Las Vegas residency behind them and a second one at the Sphere, which opened in July 2025, the same month they reissued Millennium as Millennium 2.0.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.