NSYNC — "It's Gonna Be Me"

Released on May 16, 2000, "It's Gonna Be Me" arrived as the second single from the groundbreaking No Strings Attached album, carrying all the hallmarks of peak-Cheiron production. Written by Max Martin, Andreas Carlsson, and Rami Yacoub, the song was engineered with the precision of a Swiss watch—every element locked into place, every melody designed to burrow into the listener's brain and refuse to leave. For NSYNC, the moment was bittersweet: here was their only Billboard Hot 100 number-one hit, a distinction that would define their discography forever, despite the fact that other songs would feel larger and more consequential in their cultural moment.

The music video, directed by Wayne Isham and filmed in April 2000, presented a whimsical conceit: the band as plastic dolls come to life in a toy store, angling to be picked off the shelf. What made the video visually distinctive was that the doll transformation was executed through prosthetic makeup rather than CGI—effects courtesy of the legendary Screaming Mad George. This tactile, practical approach gave the video a surreal quality that digital effects might have undermined; the Boys looked genuinely strange and otherworldly in their plastic doll makeup, which was precisely the point.

The song reached number one that July and spent two weeks at the peak of the Hot 100. NSYNC landed six top-10 singles in their run, but this was the only one to go all the way—a stat that still surprises people, since "Bye Bye Bye" felt bigger. Certified 3x platinum in the US, the song became a standard-bearer for turn-of-the-millennium pop radio. Its later life would be unexpected: on January 29, 2012, a Tumblr user posted a photo of Timberlake captioned "It's Gonna Be May"—riffing on his emphatic pronunciation of "me"—and the joke became an annual internet ritual, resurfacing every April 30 like clockwork.