Bring Back Boy Bands

When my mom was in college, she was obsessed with boy bands. A defining cultural phenomenon of the late 1990s and early 2000s, these groups dominated the pop landscape at the height of their influence, gathering cult-like followings. My mom was among the many young girls lured in by the intoxicating cocktail of heart-aching ballads, really good-looking men, and sold-out tours. 

After moving to the United States in the early 2000s, my mom acclimated to a quiet suburb on the southern edge of the “Golden State,” humming the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” She brought these tunes into my upbringing. Growing up, Backstreet Boys serenaded me with “I Want It That Way” on car rides home from elementary school; The Police sang on in “Every Breath You Take” on my way to soccer practice. English—my second language—became fluent for me through sappy choruses and “na, na-na-na, na-na” refrains in One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.” 

Just like my mom, I’ve gravitated toward bands—my favorite in college is The 1975. It feels serendipitous that the year 1975 is also the year my mom was born. An indie boy band in disguise, The 1975 is a Manchester-based alternative-rock band that rose to prominence in the 2010s and expanded its influence in the 2020s. Over the course of a decade, The 1975 has achieved five consecutive No. 1 studio albums on the U.K. Official Albums Chart, a streak starting with their 2013 self-titled debut. Their album “I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It” became their second No. 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart and also topped the Billboard 200 in the United States—an achievement shared only by a handful of British acts, including The Beatles and Radiohead.

What drew me into their fandom was the lyrics—the lines are vulnerable, confessional, and provocatively honest. Listening to them showed me that music could be political and edgy and swaggering all at once. Their music is full of verve and vigor, bite and bicker. It sounds like people thinking, talking, fighting, and passing through life together. I love how unashamedly confident they are. Their journey hasn’t always been straightforward, receiving the title of worst band at the New Musical Express Awards in 2014. Still, they confronted obscene reviews by critics, leaned into a faithful cult fandom, and eventually won NME Best Band in 2020.

“What qualifies a boy band? If it’s hysteria, being surrounded in hotels and doing sell-out shows, then we’re a boy band,” lead singer and songwriter Matty Healy once joked. 

But Healy misses some more fundamental features: a boy band is also defined by collaboration, communication, and community. In an era of increasingly fragmented digital spheres, boy bands feel like relics of a past when plurality coexisted with monoculture, when millions listened to the same chorus at the same time.

Despite the success that The 1975 has achieved, boy bands—and broadly, bands as a genre—are disappearing from the top of the charts. In the first half of the 1980s, bands together occupied the number one spot for 146 weeks on the U.K. singles charts. However, in the first five years of the 2020s, that number has shrunk to just three weeks, one of which honored The Beatles’ comeback single “Now and Then.” 

Across rock, jazz, folk, and even large-scale pop groups, bands are increasingly absent from chart dominance. One reason for this disappearance lies in modern music consumption. 

First, streaming platforms prioritize singles over albums. Music discovery is driven by algorithms that reward constant output and rapid engagement. The success of new releases depends less on a cohesive album cycle, which bands are strong at, and more on virality and frequency of production. As a result, solo artists are structurally advantaged because they can release music more quickly. They can cultivate a tightly controlled personal brand, pivoting when trends go out of style. It is easier to market one face, one backstory, and one aesthetic than a collective of competing personal narratives.

Bands, by contrast, move at the pace of conversation, negotiation, and compromise. They require rehearsal, compromise, shared calendars, and the division of both creative authority and profit. This slow process is beautiful, contemplative, and meditative; it emphasizes art, which requires putting heads together, combining talents, and building a whole bigger than the sum of its parts.

Furthermore, economics reinforce this shift to one-man acts, as streaming revenue through Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms is much thinner than the margins once supported by physical album sales. As a result, for young indie musicians, independent production is both aesthetically and financially optimal. 

Technology has further compressed the need for collectivity. In the 1960s, to produce music loud enough and layered enough to fill a dance floor, you needed a band with drums, bass, guitar, and voices all present at once. Today, software enables a single producer to program percussion, synthesize strings, stack harmonies, and master a track to commercial standards, even from a dorm room. 

I have a friend who has turned his Pennypacker Hall suite into a makeshift studio, producing music that sounds professional and polished. He trades files with his Australian mate sixteen hours away. His two-man band exists through this digital magic.

With the convenience of individual production, bands must now justify their existence artistically—and that justification is essential to the health of the music industry itself. Plurality of sound, thought, and emotion is inherent to a band with multiple physical bodies. At the sonic level, multiple performers create heterogeneity by using instruments of varying frequencies and negotiating tempo and phrasing. Music critics also praise participatory discrepancies—small mistakes in music production that inevitably come with human collaboration. These errors showcase groove, idiosyncrasy, band chemistry—the best parts of the artistic experience.

At the cultural level, plurality in individuals within a band multiplies identification. Each member becomes a distinct point of attachment, as individuals identify with celebrities with different personalities, or even different ethnic, sexual, and familial experiences. Marketing research suggests that multi-member groups expand demographic reach precisely because they offer multiple personas—one member may be more shy, charismatic, edgy, funny, or serious. Choosing a favorite band member signals a form of social belonging, even while maintaining differentiation among the fan base. In middle school hallways and online forums alike, that allegiance brings people from all walks of life together. 

Even through high school, after long days at work or school, my mom and I would slip into our respective One Direction personas, belting karaoke late into Friday nights. She claims her favorite; I claim mine. The ritual bridges her early thirties and my early tween years. Our voices sound almost identical when we’re singing the chorus of “Live While We’re Young.”

As bands recede from the charts, so too does this structure of shared identification. Boy bands once created reference points across classrooms and continents, establishing a global monoculture. Now, we inhabit algorithmically curated micro-genres—bedroom pop, sad girl autumn, city pop—and hyper-personalized playlists, designed by ourselves and our musically-similar confidants. Technology has broadened the modes of production and widened the fields of taste, but it has also fractured the listening public, shattering a culture of music where a handful of artists dominated. We still love music, but now, we do so often alone, through headphones, within our own self-feeding circles.

In the hit song, “About You,” The 1975 repeats, “Do you think that I have forgotten? Do you think I have forgotten about you?” Underneath, “don’t let go” echoes. It sounds like an elegy, an ubi sunt mourning for the death of a mode of music. 

We no longer need bands to be loud so that we are immersed in sound. But, we still need boy bands for the friction of collaboration, for the beauty of shared imperfection, for the simple fact that harmony is the presence of multiple voices sharing the same air, at the same time.

Cloris Shi ’29 (clorisshi@college.harvard.edu) is in the top 0.01% of The 1975 fans on Spotify.