DNA

Six years, six whole years it’s been since we last heard from the ageless boyband that is Backstreet Boys. The last time we heard from Brian Littrell, Nick Carter, Kevin Richardson, Howie Dorough and AJ McLean was in 2012 when they released their last studio album In a World Like This. We, fans of BSB have been waiting ever since, having to make do with their timeless songs on our devices and then like a thief in the night, they have found their way back with new music. DNA is an album that without a doubt breezes out a more mature sound for the legendary boy band. It is also noteworthy that this is their first release back as a five-piece since they dropped “Never Gone” in 2005. Kevin Richardson left the group and was notably absent in their projects up until DNA. After making we lovers of BSB wait for six good years, does this album make it up to us? My answer will be an outright YES! This might actually be the Backstreet Boys’ best album since they released Black and Blue in the year 2000. The album may not hit the commercial heights as well as get all of the hype that the albums they released in the late 90s did, it still has enough to gain music lover’s attentions. DNA sees Backstreet Boys infuse the maturity they’ve garnered over the years into the kind of pop hooks they dominated the charts with back in the day. It obviously is also a more interesting record than last album In A World Like This. DNA rarely deviated from the Backstreet Boy’s harmony-driven pop sound while evolving their production to fit today’s sound which worked perfectly as it earned the group their first Grammy nomination in 17 years. That evolution carries throughout all of DNA’s 12 tracks, while also presenting Backstreet Boys’ most diverse set yet, taking in pop, R&B, 80s synths, Country and EDM influences. The lead single of the album “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was a song that had me stand still for a while, not even believing that it was a song performed by the Backstreet Boys. The members of the boyband alongside their production team had sought out a way to crack into the modern pop scene with the song being their first to chart in the United States since 2007’s “Inconsolable” and also turned out to be their biggest hit since 2005’s “Incomplete.” It totally resonates with we their long-term fans as well as fans of the modern pop landscape. Its beats blend in well with the larger-than-life harmonies the band has come to be well known for and once the catchy chorus kicks in, you realize the song makes a strong case to be one of the band’s best hits even if it will have to do a whole lot to beat the likes of “I Want It That Way” and “As Long As You Love Me.” It is just the kind of music we need from the Backstreet Boys in this day and age.

Go ahead & call me old, but I can vividly remember girls singing “Quit Playin’ Games (With My Heart)” & swooning over the different – though actually pretty identical – members of Backstreet Boys as I waited in the cafeteria line back in what was likely 2nd or 3rd grade for my nineties-ass, my friends & I forced to compare ourselves to these seemingly-perfect men from an incredibly early age, a scenario I’m certain influenced my more feminist-leaning ideals as I progressed in life. These guys have been a mainstay in Pop culture ever since, with everyone in my generation holding their particular brand of Bubblegum Pop goodness up as gospel, the differences between them & *NSYNC being the mainstream-equivalent of the West Coast/East Coast battles happening in Hip Hop at the same time; As such, I was genuinely intrigued when they’d announced a new album was dropping at the beginning of 2019, with DNA being their first album in nearly 6 years & the first one anyone actually cared about since 1999’s absolute banger Millennium, feeling like it was about time they’d made their return to the radio, especially considering how stagnant the mainstream Pop market had become in their absence – Well, you can colour me fooled, as this album not only misses the mark by a couple of years in terms of current musical trends but also makes me retroactively hate my youthful obsession with them back in the day, realizing they’ve always been a bit behind the times in comparison to their contemporaries.

Save that money and get your tickets for the 2019 Tour, because Backstreet Boys are back! Think I’m playing? This time, it’s really something special to hear – an assessment coming from someone who hated the original Backstreet Boy’s music – as I could never quite adjust to their super manufactured sound. To me, this band, and that time period, was characterized by a style that I’d call Frankenstein Pop. An ill thought-out mad scientist experiment of sounds and arrangements that sounded extremely hodgepodge, and sometimes downright corny, with over emphasized Pop hooks and almost cybernetic sounding dance routine details. Not to be confused with the straight up electro funk of Zapp n Roger, which always made funky sense - these boy band and pop-girl productions really had some of the worst interpretations of Pop-Funk in the business. They tried to take after the increasingly metallic nineties era Pop of Michael Jackson and Prince, yet it always came out wrong, insincere, and overproduced to my ears. And to put a cap on all this, the most famous of the bunch, Backstreet Boys, kept getting compared to the R&B of Boyz II Men? FOH. Sure they had great harmonies, but we’re talking minor versus major league. So, yeah, I was the ‘weirdo’ who just wasn’t buying what the corporate machine was trying to sell me. Even to this day, now that there is a late nineties, early aught resurgence in dance clubs, boy band music is popular, yet not even nostalgia can move me to groove. Which is why I am so surprised to hear one hell of an excellent Pop album from this ancient boy band, as they perfectly dip into mainstream sounds while elevating much of the concepts that trend today. They must have much better cooks in the kitchen this time around, which allow for their true musicianship and technically proficient harmonies to thrive.