The original boy band, the Backstreet Boys, spent their recent time off being adults. Brian Littrell started a family. Howie Dorough jumped into real estate. A.J. McLean tackled his drinking problem. Kevin Richardson diversified by taking up theatrical acting. Nick Carter learned that group success doesn't always carry over: The only solo album by any of the Backstreet Boys, Carter's Now or Never (2002), fell far short of the monumental sales figures the group had rung up in its heyday.

"We've all had some time to grow up, experience things individually," McLean said as he and his mates prepared to release Never Gone, their first studio album of new songs since 2000's Black and Blue. The Never Gone tour opens tonight at Sound Advice Amphitheatre west of West Palm Beach.

In a warm-up of sorts to a new round of public activity, the five members fielded questions one day last month in a conference call with entertainment writers from around the country. If one constant emerged from the exchange, it was an appreciation among all five that past glories do not guarantee a warm welcome back.

"Everything moves pretty quickly in the music industry," Richardson said. "It's always about what's new, what's next, what's going on. And whenever you take a break like we did, especially for as long as we did, there's always a risk that when you're out of sight, you're out of mind."

It's possible that Richardson and friends timed their exit perfectly. Climbing the charts alongside Britney Spears and 'N Sync, Backstreet Boys were the shiny sound of a '90s prosperity that feels remote, if not quaint, on this side of events such as 9-11, the stock market slide and war in Iraq. The bells-and-whistles vocal pop of Boys' songs such as I Want It That Way has settled into a nostalgic afterlife with Seinfeld reruns and memories of gasoline at $1.50 a gallon.

While the Boys were away, even the entertainment climate turned ugly. Online file-sharing took off and music companies blamed the upstart technology for a terrible sales slump. Other observers blamed the music itself: The machinery that replicated every success with sound-alikes clogging every available channel -- commercial radio, MTV -- was by this reasoning bound to cause audience fatigue.

Music companies nevertheless sued both users and creators of the software that enabled what the industry called mass piracy. Whatever the merits of the argument, or the legal strategy, the days of bands such as the Backstreet Boys selling 10, 12 or 14 million copies of a single album appeared to be over.

Consumers kept themselves entertained throughout all the real-world unpleasantness. Perhaps the biggest fan-friendly pop phenomenon to follow the boy bands was American Idol, the competitive sing-off with the everyperson premise: Anybody with enough talent, luck and pluck can become a millions-selling pop star. All they need is a chance and a season of face time on network television.

If the '90s belonged to Orlando-based boy-band curator Lou Pearlman, talent manager Johnny Wright and go-to producer and songwriter Max Martin, pop's new string-puller is Idol creator Simon Fuller.

"I think it's going to be interesting to see how a lot of these artists pan out [given] the fact that they have gotten success so quickly," Carter said of the Idol winners, adding, "We started at the grass roots, starting from, you know, nothing and building it up slowly and then over the time period, and that's the old-fashioned way of how an artist goes about it ... So I really don't know how much structure the artists that come from [American Idol] are going to have, but it's going to be interesting ... to see if they can handle the stress of what this industry has to offer."

Carter's self-appraisal of a band bolstered by dues-paying experience doesn't hint at the grief the Backstreet Boys took in the '90s. Critics lampooned them as the pop equivalent of trained seals -- put through their paces by tutor-svengalis Pearlman, Wright and Martin. If the caricature contained some truth, it also ignored the group's shared history. In typical band fashion, the five came together, developed a sound and shopped it around. They found backing, and finally a record deal, and off they went, conquering Europe before catching on back home.

Maybe it was the link to Disney World's hometown and to Pearlman, who also discovered 'N Sync. Maybe it was the plainly borrowed sound -- a jumped-up strain of Boyz II Men's harmonizing r&b. Maybe it was the eagerness to please, and the air of schooling and choreography that attended the Boys' every public gesture. All these may have contributed to the loathing of tastemakers. The Boys' obliterating successes only stoked the annoyance.

Success also created pressure to keep the franchise rolling, and by 2001 the whole group was feeling exhausted -- by criticism, by demands on their time, by the fights they had undertaken to sever contractual ties with Pearlman and Wright. McLean was in and out of rehab, and his struggles with drinking had become part of the public story line.

Enough, it seemed, was enough. The Boys, together since 1994, pushed themselves offstage with the boy-band backlash lapping at their heels.

"We needed to take some time to ourselves on the break," Carter said. "We really didn't know when would be the next time that we would do an album."

The album finds the group reunited on some songs with producer-composer Martin and with manager Wright. Its sound is unmistakable -- towering hooks and scale-blanketing harmonies in a cocoon of reverb. The lyrics and dramatic rendering of the first single Incomplete sound as aimed at schoolgirl hearts as any previous Boys hit. But, as if taking cues from Carter's rocked-up solo effort, guitars move forward in a mix once dominated by keyboards. One song, Weird World, has a rhythmic bounce and harmonic turns that are more '60s Motown than '90s Orlando. Growing up apparently has emboldened the group to reach a bit farther back for its inspirations.

The reviews for Never Gone have been mixed, and the sales figures so far are a shadow of the group's earlier hauls. But the Boys sounded comfortable with the uncertainties facing them in their rebound effort.

"When we were recording the record, our record company was not sure who our fan base was," Richardson said. "Making the record, we didn't make it for any particular demographic."

But a small-venue warm-up tour earlier this year "kind of revealed our fan base," Richardson said. "And we did see a lot of the familiar faces that we recognized from the past, and they have gotten older. So we feel like we've hung on to a lot of our fans, but at the same time, we noticed that there were some young kids out there that when we took our break, could've only been about 8 years old. So we feel like we're gaining some new fans.

"But again, we still are not 100 percent sure, and we won't know until the album comes out ... and until we do a full blown tour."

The Backstreet Boys can't even lay first claim to the phrase "boy band" anymore. Dorough said dryly that popular music "has changed quite a bit" since Black and Blue. He added that if anyone qualifies as a boy band -- a youthful male group with a cheerfully mainstream sound and lots of heartthrob appeal -- it's rock-leaning acts such as Good Charlotte, Maroon 5 and Simple Plan.

And the Boys don't see those groups as rivals: "The only competition is really just ourselves," said Dorough, "trying to see if we can hopefully get back out there and win the hearts of our fans and the critics once again."