By the end of their run, NSYNC had tallied 11 #1 videos on TRL, second only to Spears’ 15, and one better than the Backstreet Boys’ 10. On consecutive days in April 1999 their “I Drive Myself Crazy” video set the record for highest percentage of votes online (38%) and over the phone at 1-800-DIAL-MTV (42%) on the way to spending a record 26 straight days atop the countdown. According to the endlessly informative ATRL archive, they were the show’s first musical guest, performing “Tearin’ Up My Heart” in 1998. *NSYNC were deeply ingrained within the TRL universe. Their pervasive presence on Total Request Live is another. The sales record was one way to measure that dominance. To be a teenager at the turn of the millennium was to be inundated with boy bands and pop princesses, and *NSYNC were among the most dominant of them all. But as someone whose high school years overlapped with *NSYNC and BSB’s imperial reign, no such groups ever loomed larger in America.

It’s hard to compare this moment, when streaming has supplanted sales and fan culture plays out across decentralized social media networks, with the relative monoculture of two decades ago. Maybe One Direction, or especially BTS, has built up a larger, more feverish audience around the world. Globally speaking, other boy bands may have since surpassed the scope of *NSYNC circa No Strings Attached. So when “Bye Bye Bye” dropped just days into the new millennium, it was immediately clear 2000 would be *NSYNC’s year. Furthermore, *NSYNC found themselves at the center of the teenage celebrity gossip complex thanks to Justin Timberlake’s romance with Spears, the only pop artist bigger than the moment’s two reigning boy bands. (Britney Spears, BSB, and Aaron Carter were also on Jive’s roster.) Cutting ties with Pearlman also provided a handy narrative for the new album: These boys were nobody’s puppets, a metaphor they hammered home by dangling like marionettes on the cover art and in the “Bye Bye Bye” video.

Throughout 1999, as BSB took center stage with Millennium, *NSYNC continued to get bigger, too, scoring their first Hot 100 top-10 single with “(God Must Have Spent) A Little More Time on You” and then climbing all the way to #2 with the Gloria Estefan collab “Music Of My Heart.” Boy bands were still an easy punchline for much of the population - and as a dorky teenage boy trying to prove my masculine bona fides, I certainly made a sport of scoffing at them - but it was clear even grownups were starting to pay attention to *NSYNC.īehind the scenes, the group’s messy legal battle with former manager Lou Pearlman - the svengali who also once managed BSB and went on to die in prison in 2016 - was settled just in time to put out No Strings Attached on Jive Records, the hip-hop bastion that had refashioned itself as the defining label of Y2K teen-pop. ‘N Sync spawned a bunch of pop radio hits including the dance-pop tracks “I Want You Back” and “Tearin’ Up My Heart” and ballads like “Thinking Of You (I Drive Myself Crazy),” tracks that leveraged not only the burgeoning hormones of teenage listeners but the hookups and heartbreaks that resulted from those hormones. *NSYNC themselves had experienced explosive growth in the two years since their self-titled debut finally saw US release in 1998, nearly a year after it dropped in Europe. Momentum that had been building throughout the late ’90s was reaching its apex, and *NSYNC were there to capitalize on it with tabloid appeal and some of the most impeccable pop songs of the TRL era. But in the 10 months since BSB’s big splash, the teen-pop arms race had escalated significantly. *NSYNC’s peers and rivals the Backstreet Boys had set the record the previous year, moving 1.3 million copies of their own sophomore effort, Millennium. When the superstar boy band’s second album No Strings Attached dropped on Ma20 years ago this Saturday - it sold 2.4 million copies in its first week. *NSYNC didn’t just break the first-week sales record, they obliterated it.

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