1/2
Back in the day there were NKOTB, BSB and 'N sync in the US, Take that, Blue and Westlife in the UK. While there were also many others behind their shadow. How many do you remember?
25 Boy bands which could not reach the front-row in our childhood
NostalgiaYeah. You’re spot on here. 98 Degrees was honestly pretty big, but SG was Huge. Funny High School story. The 98 Degrees Christmas album got stuck in my friend’s car CD player. We gave him endless shit for it.
“Bro, my sister put it in and now I can’t get it out, even though I like totally hate it.”
My homie used to ROCK the Vanessa Carlton CD in his pick up truck shamelessly. I looked up to him as an older brother kinda. He’d get flamed for it but it helped teach me to not care what anyone thinks.
I eventually started blasting Dido out of my first car.
I feel like with Savage Gardens a lot of people knew the hits,but didn't necessarily know who they were by. Doesn't help that they picked a name that makes them sound like a grunge band.
I had no idea until this very moment that Savage Garden was a boy band and not in fact, a grunge or alt rock band.
I mean, they weren't the average configuration for a boyband at the time. Savage Garden was just two guys.
On an aside I remember watching Zenon on Disney channel and that movie had a fictional band named "Protozoa" which was supposed to sound like music of the future, I looked up that song ("Supernova Girl") from that movie on YouTube a few years back and said "this just sounds like a Savage Garden ripoff". I can't believe I didn't catch that back then. If 1997 and the Savage Garden sound was the future then uh… ok.
That’s the only two I’ve ever heard of.
Not 2gether?!!!
They need to learn some CALCULUS!
chic-a-cherry cola
Savage garden I don’t think qualifies as a boy band. More like “lite rock of the cusp” they didn’t have coordinated dance numbers, that’s my qualifier.
Yeah, they were just a band. Also 2gether was literally a GAG.
With Chris Farley’s brother in it!
I forgot about that part!
Unless it was added as larf, I'm guessing OP doesn't know much about that act -- I mean, the Google synopsis even previews the bit where it clearly states they are a fictional boy band. Even if they did try to be serious (I think they did some actual performances for fun, but that's very different), the youngest member was too sick before he passed away to make that even remotely a thing then.
Looks like they did some charity performances for a foundation in his name, which is very kind.
The youngest kid in Together actually died very young. He had some sort of medical issue but it's very sad. Now that I think about it, the guy for LFO died recently of a medical issue as well.
edit: just looked it up. His name in the show was QT and he died in 2001. Only 16 :(
Also looked up LFO and it looks like two of the three members have passed away from cancer. This is getting depressing....
🎶 Say it, don’t spray it. I want news (I want the news) Not the weeeaaatthher🎶
Why…. Do I still retain this in my brain???
Yea I don't think they belong here at all. While I wasn't a fan of any boy band, 98 degrees is the only one that Is a boy band that I remember from TRL so I don't think they count. I'd also be hard pressed to put New kids in the same category as they were the first wave, and the rest were late 90s second wave.
98 Degrees were the de facto #3 boy band, there was a big gap between BSB/NSync and the field, but 98 Degrees got closer than anyone else.
Yeah, I won't stand for the Savage Garden slander! They were the first concert I attended and I scream-cried as only a obsessed teenage girl can. 😅 😂
Yeah I feel like those two were extremely popular.
Savage Garden was the first CD I bought myself!! 😎❤️
I mean 98° or Savage Garden shouldn't be on there, they were on the lower end of boy hand fame but still pretty popular. Hell Nick Lashay married Jessica Simpson and managed to hold a reality show for a few years. Savage Garden had I Want You which still pops up until this day.
The rest of these are "literally who's?" that many would be hard pressed to even remember one song from.
Goes to show how over saturated the boy band era really was and why it seemed to just burn out at the turn of the century.
Also "Hip-Pop" 🤣 That's funny because that's what I call much of the rap released these days even though I never heard of those dudes.
Edit: I missed LFO on there, let's be real "Summers Girls" was cheesy but that shit went for a little while.
Still are!
You will not slander 2GE+HER in this house
I whole-heartedly agree with this!! U+ME=US is my ring tone and has been for a while lol
U and U and Me. My perfect fantasy. Every song is a banger.
I also don’t like LFO getting shit on. I fell for the girl on TV.
O-Town is also great. I actually paid more for shipping than I did the CD. .01 cents for the CD and like $3 shipping.
All three of those bands were huge when I was in middle school.. I was obsessed and I think at some point even wrote fanfic somewhere in my journals about LFO 😂🤦🏻♀️ and don’t even get me started on Ashley from O-Town… 🥴🥰
APA is amazing. His solo album, not so much. I didn’t listen to them in high school but after high school I realized I love boy bands.
Girl on TV is great. I still listen to a lot of it. The Painter on Liquid Dreams is a song I love. I’m a 42 year old man and I will bust out boy bands. I love singing All or Nothing during karaoke but I am a terrible singer.
My wife and I randomly ran across O-Town performing on a tiny stage at the Washington State Fair in Puyallup, WA, in 2018. It was... about what you'd expect and delightfully awkward. Fair play to them for still holding onto the dream, though.
You plus me, it doesn't equal us
You took my car now I gotta take the bus
I thought I had a girl that I could trust
I guess I never knew my calculus
She even took the cat!
Omg are those the actually lyrics??? Amazing
It's an amazing song.
I know my calculus!
It's in my calculus
The hardest part of breaking up is getting back your stuff!
You took my sweaters, my hat. I can't find my cat! 🎵
The pure poetry of these lyrics. Kids today will never know
Goddammit now that song's gonna be stuck in my head all day at work😭😂
Say it don't spray it.
I want the news. Not the weather
The old fat bald guy is my favorite
He's Kevin Farley, Chris Farley's brother
I loved them. They were completely satire and I didn't even give af.
Still my favorite boy band and I will fight anyone who tries to tell me they're not a real boy band.
🎶when I say meat, you say cheese🎶 they were peak jack and the box marketing
I'm losing my hair, and my vision is shady...
I legit forgot about them until they were referenced in the new Trolls movie. I was equally shocked that they didn't mention 98 Degrees.
OP clearly never learned his calculus
I’ve been watching Girls5eva and it makes me get so many 2gether songs in my head
Also, savage garden wasn’t really a boy band, and they were pretty big.
Yeah very weird to include Savage Garden in here
Should have thrown Pearl Jam in there too to see if anyone noticed
And leave out lfo
Came here just to say Savage Garden DOES NOT belong on this list!
Yup! They were huge in Australia!
Absolutely massive in malaysia too
Savage Garden is the shit
That’s true. Darren Hayes(one of the two from Savage Garden) just had a tour last year.. I went to see him in San Francisco and really enjoyed all the Savage Garden songs. Lol. Also they put 98 degrees, BoyZone here… hello?
He was terrific live when I saw him in Chicago! The guy is super talented.
More like a band of boys.
How did Savage Garden and 98° not reach your front row?!
Uh, I’m not seeing fingerbang anywhere here. What’s up? 👉🏻👌🏻
Also missing Faith + 1 for those of us who really love Jesus
Underrated comment.
“Summer Girls” by LFO was HUGE when it first came out!!! It was probably the top song of the summer that year and is still iconic.
CHINESE FOOD MAKES ME SICK
And I think it's fly when girls stop by
For the summer, for the summer
I immediately looked for LFO because I was like Summer Girls alone clears them from this list!
Heard one of the leads of LFO passed from cancer in the aughts. Jennifer Love Hewitt and that rarely heard "Girl on TV".
Actually two of them have died, Brad is the only one that’s still alive.
Dafuq
It’s 3 gone. The guy Devin originally replaced died last year too.
I loved LFO so much, I begged my parents for their cassette 🥴
Also, I went to the „All That! Music Festival and more“ in 2000 and LFO was the headliner for it. I don’t remember much of the festival minus my Grandma singing along to „west side story“ and I thought she was soo cool.
Every Other Time has made it on my top 100 songs on apotify the last couple of years
Summertime girls are the kind I like.... i steal your honey like i stole yo bike!
I’m no 98 degrees fan but they’re on a Disney soundtrack with Stevie Wonder, they don’t deserve to be on that list and I will die on that hill lol
Yah they were definitely the biggest boy band of that era next to Backstreet Boys and NSYNC.
Yep. They were a distant 3rd place, but still relevant. Some of these other ones I've legit never heard of.
Somewhere Nick Lachey is crying
"Hey guys, it's me, Nick Lachey"
Fuck are you talking about! Faded by Soul Decision fucks.
Greatest song ever
This is my bestie's and my drunk karaoke jam!
I can't pretend you're only my friend when you're holding my body tight!
For years I wondered who sang that song and I was shocked to discover that they were white lol
A few of their other songs aren't too bad either, "ooh its kinda crazy" finds its way onto my playlist now and again
Stillll have this song on repeat TO THIS DAY
Ooh, It’s Kinda Crazy was a jam too. Got a bit of airplay in the U.S. and I still hear it on Canadian radio.
Still a great song.
Also Trevor Guthrie is on Armin van Buuren’s This is what it Feels Like. Which was also a banger in 2012.
So underrated
I still listen to BBMak! Always thought they should have been bigger
Out of my Heart just hit my nostalgia bone. Completely forgot about it
Omg thank you for mentioning it, I loved that song
I still listen to "Still on Your Side."
So glad to see another BBMak fan, I was really into them in 8th/9th grade. I obsessively listened to “Sooner or Later” on my discman haha - I’m going to have to listen to that album again!
Savage Garden and 98° seem an odd choice for this one. They were hugely popular. Savage Garden was one of my go-to panty-droppers. I knew plenty of ladies who were into 98°.
Savage Garden wasn’t even a boy band. They were just songwriters, with only one of them singing (the talented Darren Hayes).
I loved Dream Street 😅
I used to run the Greg Raposo fan site Boy Wonder 😂😂😂
I remember this website!! I was a huge Greg fan!
I had a fleeting moment of becoming a pop star myself because of them…. I had cashed in all my savings bonds (lol!) to record a demo and had met them/gotten backstage so many times that I met their manager/gave him my shitty demo and had plans to head to NY to record a REAL demo with him….. and then he had the sexual abuse allegations and my mom was like, yeah, no, we’re not doing this. 🥲
I may or may not have watched the video to "It happens every time" an ungodly amount of times on their website before YT was even a thing. I wanted to be them so bad.
Their reunion performance of this song that they did during Covid to honor Chris is great
My friends and I still do the dance from that video! Iconic
I have watched that an embarrassing number of times in adulthood. This post got that stuck in my head once again.
I had a huge crush on Jesse McCartney looking back lol. Also, the choreography was on point. Just watched the video for the first time in decades. The nostalgia!
Jesse carved himself out a nice little career afterwards, was definitely a fan of Body language and the sort
Ty
Theirs was one of the few names I recognized but I can't reber a single song
It happens every time....
Sameeeee I def had that CD in my house
Put some respect on on Dream Street’s name! Jesse McCartney origins. And Chris’s song with Play went crazy on my CD player.
Also Summer Girls by LFO is a banger. And Hey Juliet by LMNT.
RIP Chris. Their reunion was so bittersweet, wish it could have happened earlier with all of them.
While O-Town didn't quite get as popular as other boy bands, their song "We Fit Together" is one of the best boy band songs out there.
All or Nothing is a classic
I heard this come on in the grocery store the other day and paused my podcast to soak it in. It’s a forgotten classic.
Liquid Dreams is so good
Listening to the lyrics now versus then is one hell of a trip lmao
I mean really just the title should be a dead giveaway lmao
The fact that only one member of LFO is still alive (out of four if you include the original founding member) is proof that they were cursed.
5ive, Savage Garden, 911 and A1 were very big in the UK! Edited to add Boyzone were absolutely massive!!!!
Boyzone was huge and predates, like, all of the boybands we love!
5ive were big in Australia too
A1!? Did they want to be the first boyband listed in the yellow pages?
2ge+her was a joke and it was still as popular as o-town and lfo
Holy shit Plus One 😆 I was raised in a super Christian house and at some point, my mom decided we should only listen to Christian music. She yeeted my backstreet boys CD and gave me a Plus One CD instead.
Also, I saw No Authority perform at a mall once! Man I miss the 90s
I was not expecting anyone to know Plus One. I saw them perform at my church in high school 😆
I loved Phat Chance and Plus One too! I’m still angry no platform streams Phat Chance’s first album. I was obsessed. I met Bryan Nance at a Plus One/Phat Chance concert and it was my first real celebrity crush (I was 10).
Written On My Heart was all over the Disney Channel in the early 2000s! That song is a bop
Plus one was my jam back in the day 😂
I loved bbmak
No lie when I visited London in the summer of 2022 I fulfilled a childhood dream by riding on the London Eye, something I'd always wanted to do ever since seeing it in the music video for Back Here.
Some of these are alright, but others are truly bizarre to put on here.. I think the biggest fail here is Boyzone - they were HUGE .. Westlife that you mentioned as a primary - are you aware that they basically is Boyzone part 2? Also Savage Garden which is hardly a boyband and where huge for a significant time. Its like - what?! I don't even like them, but they deserve their props.
Then there is 2. tier bands that were also big, but obviously not like the other randos.. 98 degrees where pretty big, 5ive had several big hits, a1 is an edge-case but at least deserves 1-hit wonder status. LFO maybe. O-town meh.
The rest I agree and deserve clown status LMAO.
Maybe someone could make a spotify playlist with all the bands from this post? Could be pretty sweet honestly.
EDIT: BTW I still kinda love this post for the nostalgia boost
A quick wiki search shows both 5ive and Boyzone sold 20 million records each. Absolutely don't fit here 
Boyzone has no reason to be on this list. It's obviously very US-centric.
Wasnt 98 degrees pretty popular ?
I still listen to BBMak alllll the time. I love them sfm.
Don’t forget Faith+1
Plus one is on there, which is what they were parodying. Plus one was a super cheesy Christian boy band
Soul Decision, O-Town and 98 degrees were popular for me growing up in western Canada :D
Where's 5ive!?
Thank you so much I have been trying to remember who does "baby when the lights ..go out.." for decades
Had this song on repeat all through high school
The top left corner of the 2nd pic.
They were way bigger here in Australia than the other UK bands mentioned, definitely Blue or dare I say even Westlife and Take That
Savage Garden was never a boy band
Plus One is a pretty niche pull. They were put together to be the Christian alternative boy band for Christians that wouldn’t do anything “out of line” I guess. 95% of their songs are so vague that it could be about God or a girl, which makes sense marketing wise.
The first album (I don’t know if they have others) was actually not bad though. They were all talented and could all lead songs depending on what it was. I say this as a straight 35 year old man but it’s not bad for the time at all. Id even dare to say it’s better than a lot of other bigger names on this list.
I also shot a reality tv show pilot for Jacob Underwood from O-Town (around 2010 or 2011) that never got picked up but it was an interesting experience to say the least. I learned a LOT about Lou Pearlman that day.
98° was definitely popular. Not sure why that’s in here. Not as popular as BSB or N’SYNC, but nobody could beat those two bands.
5ive was so big one of their songs made it into a football tournament anthem. Also, they shared the stage with Queen for their version of We Will Rock You...
Whatever it is you're smoking, please let me know, I'd like some too
I'm sorry but Five shouldn't be on here, they had loads of hits in the UK.
LFO got 2 really huge hits.
“Girl on TV” was written about Jennifer Love Hewitt & she was in the music video…what is more late 90s than that?!
2Ge+her was also a fictional, satire group of the boy band trope. It was a movie, and not really intended to be a real thing, but people went nuts for them.
Who remembers Youngstown from the Disney Inspector Gadget movie?
Boring? Isn't that when they cracked the human genome and boy bands roamed the earth?
Missing C Note from this list.. 😢
God I’m such a boyband whore because I recognize almost all the ones mentioned in OP AND recognize c note too 😂
Where’s East 17? 😂 Definitely listened to 5ive, 98 Degrees and O-Town from this list. Savage Garden doesn’t really fit with the theme imo
BABY DOWN ON DREAM STREET
And B4-4 if you was Canadian or a burgeoning gay American with Napster 👍👍👍
Soul Decision is pure Canadian nostalgia
Heeeey, saw plus one in concert.
Savage garden was good tho
I have Dream Street's CD somewhere and I played it constantly. It gave us Jesse McCartney!!
I remember 98 degrees, No Authority, and Dream Street.
Also, Savage Garden was certainly 'front row' during the time and they have a very distinct style from being a 'boy band '
Otown , soul decision & five were at my home in Canada 🇨🇦
How very dare you call 2ge+her back of the line. They were the alpha. The omega.
All I can wonder is why is no one asking 'wheres the Moffat's?'
Those of you saying you haven't heard of most of these bands have probably absolutely heard at least one of their songs. Almost all of these bands had at least one huge hit.
Dream Street lived on Disney Channel for a while and gave us Jesse McCartney.
Savage Garden had at least two big hits I can remember. BBMak had that one song in the Princess Diaries that everyone was obsessed with plus Back Here which was on the radio all the time.
O-Town's Ashley Parker Angel had a TV show on VH1 or MTV, I can't remember which, and everyone in my school was obsessed.
I saw 98° and LFO together in concert in like 1998. Summer Girls by LFO was super popular around then. 98° was huge at the time and gave us the Lachey Brothers!
Most of these bands are one or two hit wonders, but they still made it to some level of popularity for some time.
I had albums for…
LFO, SoulDecision, O-Town, 98’, and Savage Garden.
Except for O-Town, I still listen to all of them. I’d say they’re all AT LEAST as popular as Take That, and some are more so.
The rest I have never heard of.
Edit: My husband has heard of all of mine, plus LMNT, DreamStreet, Take 5, and BBMAK.
Funny story…when he was a Marine in Iraq he was sent a care package from a teen girl in Utah who sent all her boy band music because she was done with them. As a result, he is now a huge boy band fan and can sing along with all the songs.
98 degrees is the only one I recognize
If you know what YOU plus ME equals then congrats, you know your calculus.
I wasn’t in to pop but even I had a savage garden cd. I also knew who 98 degrees was
98° headlined a lot of concerts I went to. Like the Jingle Ball junk where it features several artist. I still jam to some Savage Garden too.
2GETHER was the shit stop playing
Man those b44 guys always looked so weird to me.
What? 98 degrees and o-town had number 1 billboard hits.
To be fair the band 2Gether was a joke boy band with a TV show for MTV. Chris Farley's brother was one of the members. Haha. Was super funny.
They know their calculus. U + Me = US
Omg I was the BIGGEST Dream Street fan (RIP Chris💔)! Dream Street, 98 degrees, LFO, otown & 2ge+her were regularly played in my house.
I still play 2gether and soul decision and im 35 lmfaoooo
B4-4’s song “get down” feels like an SNL sketch making fun of boy bands, the sexual undertones alone…
I mean, 5ive was a popular as the Backstreet Boys at my school?
My youth right here. YTV hitlist on Friday sold me No Authority, Soul Decision, 98 degrees, 5ive, Take 5 and near the end B44 and Otown…changing my playlist now
BBMack, Soul Decision, Youngstown, OTown, 98 Degrees, LFO, Savage Garden….. the era of boy bands
When I tell you I WORE OUT my LMNT and Dreamstreet cds and will not hear any slander about either one of them.
I still out here listening to o town, 98 degrees and savage garden. But I did love dream street back in the day!
Baby down on dream street 🎶
98 Degrees and Savage Garden were a thing at my house lol