A new reissue from Legacy Recordings - one with an extremely long lead time - will revisit the ascendance of the Backstreet Boys to the top of a crop of late '90s and early '00s boy bands.

The quintet's 1999 blockbuster Millennium will be celebrated for its belated 25th anniversary with a new 2CD, 2LP and digital set that pairs the original album with a baker's dozen rare and unreleased tracks, including B-sides, demos, live cuts and the new track "Hey." The album will be out July 11 (yes, roughly five months from its Valentine's Day announcement), to time with the group's summer residency at the Sphere venue in Las Vegas.

Millennium 2.0, as the reissue is branded, will take fans back to the year the group - singers Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell, AJ McLean and Kevin Richardson - established a new wave of sleek European pop sung by charismatic Americans that soon took the mainstream youth of the United States by storm. The group, formed in Orlando, Florida in 1993, had released two albums internationally - a self-titled release in 1996 and Backstreet's Back in 1997 - and first lit up the airwaves when the cream of those albums were released as a U.S.-only self-titled album in 1997. (That record sold north of 14 million copies and included the singles "Quit Playing Games (with My Heart)," "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" and "All I Have to Give," all of which were Top 10 hits on both sides of the Atlantic.)

But despite the frothy power of cuts like "I Want It That Way," "Larger Than Life," "Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely" and "The One," Millennium was the culmination of difficult circumstances for the entire group. They would spend the preceding years extricating themselves from a contract with manager Lou Pearlman, who also bankrolled a rival Orlando group called *NSYNC. (That group, who would ascend to similar heights as the Backstreet Boys, would also take to the justice system to disentangle themselves from Pearlman, who died in 2016 while serving a 25-year sentence for running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history.) In addition to the Pearlman drama, Richardson and Dorough lost family members during the recording sessions, Littrell underwent open-heart surgery connected to a congenital condition, and Denniz PoP, the Swedish producer who guided the group on debut single "We've Got It Goin' On," succumbed to stomach cancer at the age of 35. (PoP's protegee Max Martin co-wrote and co-produced seven tracks on Millennium, helping kickstart a career that includes a record 25 Billboard No. 1s produced.) Promoted by a trio of memorable music videos for "I Want It That Way," "Larger Than Life" and "Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely," Millennium was a qualified success, topping the the charts in 20 countries, becoming Billboard's top selling album of the year and receiving a 13x platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America. The album would receive six Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year plus Record of the Year and Song of the Year for "I Want It That Way."

Beyond the new track "Hey," the bonus material includes four B-sides from the album's European singles, six live tracks from a 2000 set at the Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis (three of which are released for the first time) and two exciting rarities from the vault: a demo of fan favorite (what else?) "The Perfect Fan" and, for the first time, the original version of "I Want It That Way." (This oft-leaked variant features dramatically different lyrics, culminating in the legendary final verse that was repurposed for the beginning of the rather nonsensical final mix.) The album packaging also features the group recreating the original album's white-attired front cover in a new photoshoot.

Millennium 2.0 (Jive/RCA/Legacy 19802 83677-2, 2025)

2CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
2LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada

CD/LP 1: Original album (released as Jive 01241-44016-2, 1999)

1. Larger Than Life
2. I Want It That Way
3. Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely
4. It's Gotta Be You
5. I Need You Tonight
6. Don't Want You Back
7. Don't Wanna Lose You Now
8. The One
9. Back to Your Heart
10. Spanish Eyes
11. No One Else Comes Close
12. The Perfect Fan

CD/LP 2: Bonus content (* previously unreleased)

1. Hey *
2. I'll Be There for You
3. You Wrote the Book on Love
4. If You Knew What I Knew
5. My Heart Stays with You
6. I Want It That Way (Alternate Lyric) *
7. The Perfect Fan (Demo) *
8. Larger Than Life (Live @ The Conseco Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, IN - 3/11/2000)
9. Don't Wanna Lose You Now (Live @ The Conseco Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, IN - 3/11/2000) *
10. I Want It That Way (Live @ The Conseco Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, IN - 3/11/2000)
11. Don't Want You Back (Live @ The Conseco Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, IN - 3/11/2000) *
12. The One (Live @ The Conseco Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, IN - 3/11/2000) *
13. Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely (Live @ The Conseco Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, IN - 3/11/2000)

Tracks 2 and 5 from "I Want It That Way" U.K. CD single - Jive 0523392, 1999
Tracks 3 from "Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely" U.K. CD single - Jive 9250082, 2000
Track 4 from "Larger Than Life" U.K. CD single - Jive 0550662, 1999
Tracks 8, 10 and 13 from "Just Want You to Know" U.K. CD single - Jive 82876 72616-2, 2005