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Justin Timberlake was the most visible, most pushed, and ultimately, most popular member of the band. And in 2002, the same year NSYNC announced that they’d be taking a “temporary” hiatus following their highly successful Pop Odyssey tour, Timberlake leveraged his position as the group’s frontman to announce a solo album. Prior to Timberlake’s foray into solo stardom, he addressed rumors that asserted his solo efforts would mark the end of NSYNC. “There’s no reason my solo career and NSYNC can’t coexist in the same universe,” Timberlake shared with the New York Post ahead of the release of his first album, “Justified.”
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However, according to Timberlake’s band members, his solo efforts ultimately torpedoed NSYNC’s future. During a 2018 interview with HuffPost, Joey Fatone spoke of NYSNC’s demise. “It was, ‘OK, after [Justin] does his thing, blah, blah, blah, we’ll get back together and move forward and do what we got to do,” said Fatone. “And then it was like, nope. The record company wanted to push Justin, I guess, is what it was. He got bigger and bigger.” A decade earlier, Lance Bass shared in his memoir, “Out of Sync,” that Timberlake ultimately decided to end the group. “We’re definitely broken up. It’s not a hiatus. Justin made it clear that he wouldn’t be interested in discussing another album any time soon,” wrote Bass.
