“Are you guys doing one thing?” requested the members of *NSYNC on Sept. 12 whereas onstage on the MTV Video Music Awards, the place the reunited boy band had simply arrived to shrieks and offered Swift the very best pop trophy. “I must know what it’s!” *NSYNC was again, and even pop’s largest famous person was amped.
Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Lance Bass, Chris Kirkpatrick and Joey Fatone demurred on the time, however quickly after the VMAs, *NSYNC introduced “Higher Place,” its first new track collectively in over 20 years. The shimmering, falsetto-heavy disco-pop monitor was created for , the third installment within the hit animated movie collection during which Timberlake voices a foremost character, Department, and has contributed hits to every of the primary two Trolls motion pictures.
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“My pleasure began manner again within the early a part of the 12 months,” says , the producer/music supervisor for the movies. That was when Timberlake despatched her a demo of “Higher Place,” designed to comply with his Billboard Hot 100-topping smash “Can’t Cease the Feeling!” from the unique Trolls movie in 2016 and his SZA collaboration, “The Different Facet,” from 2020’s Trolls World Tour.
Shortly after sending the demo, Timberlake texted Shay that he felt impressed to reunite *NSYNC to document “Higher Place.” “It was like dynamite was going off inside my mind,” Shay says. In any case, *NSYNC — whose 4 studio albums have offered 27.9 million copies, based on Luminate, and scored turn-of-the-century smashes like “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me” — hadn’t launched music collectively since 2002.
And whereas Trolls Band Collectively focuses on a boy band reunion, Shay says that the plot had been locked in lengthy earlier than any speak of an *NSYNC comeback. “The film’s story has been stable for about 4 years,” she says, “so it was simply that excellent confluence of a track to reunite *NSYNC and to hold the narrative.”
Though Shay says that coordinating all 5 members’ schedules with their particular person groups “took a little bit time to kind by,” “Higher Place” got here collectively slightly seamlessly as soon as the quintet was absolutely on board. After *NSYNC introduced its reunion on the VMAs and unveiled “Higher Place” on Sept. 29, Shay hopes that the track will grow to be ubiquitous previous to the Nov. 17 launch of Trolls Band Collectively — however nonetheless excessive it climbs, she’s glad that the movie franchise might play a job within the reformation of a pop behemoth like *NSYNC.
“I’m so glad we have been ready to do that for the followers,” she says. “It has been a mixture of love, pandemonium and need achievement.”
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
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