Music

Joey Fatone & Lance Bass Are Still Mortified By These *NSYNC Songs

“It wasn’t our style.”

by Jake Viswanath
NSYNC's Joey Fatone & Lance Bass Still Cringe Over These Songs
Michel Linssen/Redferns/Getty Images

*NSYNC made some of the best boy band jams of all time — and a few songs that even the members are embarrassed by. On Dec. 12, Lance Bass and Joey Fatone revealed the *NSYNC songs that still make them cringe over two decades later.

In an interview with PEOPLE during the Bilt Rewards’ 2023 Winter Holiday House Party in New York, Fatone said he regrets making deep cuts “Riddle,” “I Need Love,” and “Here We Go,” from their 1997 self-titled debut album. Bass was in agreement. “Those ones were a little err...,” he added. “The rest we love. It wasn’t our style. We weren’t a techno group.”

Fatone went on to explain that the band made those ’90s techno-inspired tunes to satisfy the European market. “It was basically the dance music that was in Europe at the time, and obviously at that time crunch, was in the States,” he said. “We tried to do our kind of stuff in our vibe, but they wanted to do a little bit more dance.”

In fact, one of those songs, “Riddle,” was so Europop-inspired that it didn’t even appear on the U.S. edition of the album.

More New *NSYNC Music

Needless to say, if *NSYNC ever goes on a reunion tour, those three songs will not be on the setlist. However, it’s unclear whether they will even reunite for more music, let alone a whole tour.

*NSYNC’s Lance Bass, JC Chasez, Chris Kirkpatrick, Justin Timberlake, and Joey Fatone in 2023.VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images

The group recently came back together for “Better Place,” a new song for Justin Timberlake’s film Trollz: Band Together, in which Fatone, Bass, JC Chasez, and Chris Kirkpatrick also voice members of a boy band. The fivesome reunited multiple times to promote the single, but there’s been no sign of more things to come yet.

Speaking to PEOPLE, Bass said “in a perfect world,” new music “would be great,” but Fatone was more cautious. “Everybody has to get that time to get in there to get into the studio,” he said.

“It took us a minute to do the Trolls song. Everybody has their own lives now. A lot of people are married, have kids. We want to do it but it's getting it all together.”