#250 — *NSYNC — No Strings Attached (2000)

PostingDad
3 min readJan 13, 2025

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A beginning and an ending.

Photo by Lidia Nemiroff on Unsplash

Is this the 250th best album of the 21st century? It’s definitely the best *NSYNC album, and opens with back-to-back bangers. Bye Bye Bye followed by perennial 30 April meme track It’s Gonna Be Me. So far, so good.

Then there’s a hip-hop country meditation on milleniarian prophecy and humanity’s future in space, featuring the late, great Lisa Left-Eye Lopez. No, seriously, Space Cowboy (Yippie-Yi-Yay) opens with JC Chasez singing “Here it comes, millennium. And everybody’s talkin’ ‘bout Jerusalem. Is this the beginning or beginning of the end? Well I’ve got other thoughts, my friend”. Yes, it’s about ignoring the end of the world and going for a space-ride.

Elsewhere between the heartfelt slow-guitar and harp jams, is Digital Get Down which is about honest-to-god cybersex and feels like a strange window into a world of dial-up and having to say ‘digital screen’ to be clear what you mean. Credit to Justin and JC they’re not just asking their girl to get naked in 240p over a satellite connection, they’re promising to ‘get down for you’ as well. How gracious.

Listening to No Strings Attached sometimes feels like reading about greek fire in ancient texts. We can recreate the effects of this boyband pop with single directions of KPop superstars, but we can’t recreate cultural recipe that created this album and its sound. Listening to this album you can hear elements of pop production that only existed at this time, that couldn’t pass today.

It’s the sound of TLC and Boyz II Men, the post-Michael Jackson pop landscape that slowly morphed into new and more hip-hop and dance influenced music with the turn on the millennium. For all that 2024 was a great year for pop, especially girl pop, nothing out there could sound like this in todays pop landscape.

This is laser-guided teen-targeting nineties boyband pop. It’s the harmonic vocals and an undercurrent of toxicity that stays just the right side of creepy — although “It Makes Me Ill” might vary your personal mileage. You can hear the frosted tips and pleather jackets, you can hear Justin Timberlake straining against the constraints of his group.

At the time this album broke sales records, and it’s probably the last great boyband album of the 1990’s production line. Within two years and one further, lesser, album, *NSYNC would be on their permanent creative hiatus.

If they’d gone out on this one, it wouldn’t have done their reputation a single bit of damage.

*NSYNC — No Strings Attached (2000)

Best track: It’s Gonna Be Me

Bye Bye Bye has the cachet, but It’s Gonna Be Me is probably the purest *NSYNC track you’re going to get. Timberlake’s entire vocal track is deranged, and that’s a good thing.

Underrated banger: That’s When I’ll Stop Loving You

A proper billowing shirts torch-song from the lads here, you can hear the fake snow and the open arms appeal to a camera zooming down on them from above. The sort of song you’re belting out at 4am with your mates after too many beers.

You can find most of it on *NSYNC’s Youtube, or on your streaming service of choice: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjkyfFH-MWZhasolgds05EA

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PostingDad
PostingDad

Written by PostingDad

It’s longer stuff from PostingDad, the dad who posts.

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