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Though their decade-plus of radio ubiquity certainly merits a compilation of some sort in their homeland, Universal Music Group has yet to anthologize the work of pop band Maroon 5 stateside. However, a new compilation from UMG’s Japanese branch offers a summary of the group across nearly two decades.

The Singles Collection offers 21 tracks, nearly all of which were Top 40 hits in America, including chart-toppers “Makes Me Wonder,” “Moves Like jagger,” “One More Night” and “Girls Like You” plus sizable radio staples like “She Will Be Loved,” “Payphone,” “Sugar” and “Memories.” The SHM-CD package comes with a booklet of photos from the band’s latest Japanese tour in February 2025 as well as a special photo card with some sort of contest opportunity attached to it. The cover photo features a collage of the band’s first seven albums on CD and LP; while there’s not much in the way of rarity for a hits collection, “Girls Like You” is presented in its radio remix featuring a verse from rapper Cardi B.

It’s been kind of a head-spinning journey for Maroon 5. California high school friends Adam Levine (vocals), Jesse Carmichael (guitar), Mickey Madden (bass) and Ryan Dusick (drums) debuted as Kara’s Flowers with the slick power-pop effort The Fourth World (1997), an album that utterly tanked. After recruiting Square guitarist James Valentine as new lead guitarist (with Carmichael primarily moving to keyboards and Levine adding occasional rhythm guitar), the band rebranded as Maroon 5, incorporating elements of R&B into their style. Fledgling label Octone took a chance on them in 2002 with Songs About Jane, but it took nearly two years for singles “Harder to Breathe” and the Top 10s “This Love” and “She Will Be Loved” to impact audiences. But impact they did! The group became ubiquitous, opening for John Mayer (a friend of Valentine’s when both attended the Berklee College of Music) and winning a Grammy for Best New Artist over projected favorite Kanye West (who’d collaborate with the group on a remix of “This Love” and recruited Levine for a hook on “Heard ‘Em Say,” off his sophomore album Late Registration).

Despite a lengthy gestation period for a sophomore album and a period of turbulence after drummer Dusick was sidelined by a teenage baseball injury (he was replaced by Matt Flynn, a session drummer for Gavin DeGraw and The B-52’s), sophomore album It Won’t Be Soon Before Long (2007) successfully replicated the pop/soul formula of its predecessor, with lead single “Makes Me Wonder” topping the Billboard Hot 100. Third album Hands All Over (2010), impeccably produced by hitmaker Robert John “Mutt” Lange, was another strong effort but a softer seller than the previous two – and that’s when things took a considerable shift. Levine, who’d join singing competition series The Voice as a judge, recruited fellow panelist Christina Aguilera and a cadre of outside songwriter-producers (including future Taylor Swift collaborator Shellback and Benny Blanco) for the high-energy disco-pop track “Moves Like Jagger.”

“Jagger” spent four weeks at No. 1 in America in 2011, but changed the band’s style considerably: Levine was writing almost exclusively with outside collaborators, producing catchy but colder synthesized tracks often augmented with seemingly incongruous rap verses from Wiz Khalifa (“Payphone”), Kendrick Lamar (“Don’t Wanna Know”) and Megan Thee Stallion (“Beautiful Mistakes”). The band stuck with Levine, though, performing a divisive set at the Super Bowl LIII halftime show in 2019 and helping spur the minimalist vocals-and-guitar No. 2 hit “Memories.” The line-up has changed a bit; after a brief hiatus by Carmichael, the group welcomed keyboardist P.J. Morton, both of whom are now in the band (Morton has since won five Grammys as a soloist), and Madden departed in 2020 after charges of domestic abuse. (Phantom Planet bassist Sam Farrar, a longtime friend of the band who’d served as a touring member, replaced him.) The band’s newest album, 2025’s Love is Like, was billed as something of a return to their full-band sound, though Levine still wrote most of the tracks with other producers, and the result was the band’s first studio album to miss the Top 10 by a considerable margin. (Recent set lists at arenas across America indicate that very little of it is being played live.)

The Singles Collection – a fascinating time capsule of a time when an honest-to-gosh pop band could grab the attention of the music-consuming public – is available now from the below links.

The Singles Collection (Interscope/Universal Music UICY-16324 (JP), 2025) (CDJapan / Tower Records)

1. This Love
2. Payphone (feat. Wiz Khalifa)
3. She Will Be Loved
4. One More Night
5. Moves Like Jagger (feat. Christina Aguilera)
6. Wake Up Call
7. Misery
8. Maps
9. Makes Me Wonder
10. Animals
11. Daylight
12. Sugar
13. Sunday Morning
14. Won’t Go Home Without You
15. Harder to Breathe
16. Lucky Strike
17. Don’t Wanna Know (feat. Kendrick Lamar)
18. What Lovers Do (feat. SZA)
19. Girls Like You (feat. Cardi B)
20. Memories
21. Beautiful Mistakes (feat. Megan Thee Stallion)

Tracks 1, 3, 13 and 15 from Songs About Jane – Octone 82376 50001-2, 2002
Tracks 2, 4, 11 and 16 from Overexposed – A&M Octone B0017129-02, 2012
Track 5 from reissue of Hands All Over – A&M Octone B0015984-02, 2011
Tracks 6, 9 and 14 from It Won’t Be Soon Before Long – A&M Octone B0008917-02, 2007
Track 7 from Hands All Over – A&M Octone B0014514-02, 2010
Tracks 8, 10 and 12 from V – 222/Interscope B0021495-02, 2014
Track 17 from Red Pill Blues (Deluxe Edition) – 222/Interscope B0026742-02, 2017
Track 18 from Red Pill Blues – 222/Interscope B0026740-02, 2017
Track 19 from non-LP digital single – 222 Interscope (no cat. #), 2018. Original version from Red Pill Blues
Tracks 20-21 from Jordi – 222/Interscope B0033864-02, 2021