Girls Aloud are giving us the first Noughties pop reunion that feels right

Deck the halls with diamanté and false lashes: Girls Aloud are back in town. The girl group have announced they are reuniting for a 2024 tour. Given that their first single (“Sound of the Underground”) was a Christmas No 1, I still think of Girls Aloud as a festive band – and like Christmas, their story involves a triumph of familial love over cynical consumerism and long-running differences of opinion. While many bands reunite out of greed or a yearning to rekindle the embers of waning celebrity, Girls Aloud’s reformation appears to be driven by a genuine wish to celebrate the life of their late bandmate, Sarah Harding, who died from breast cancer, aged 39, in 2021.

The recent reunions of other pop acts like NSYNC and S Club 7 – formed around the same time as Girls Aloud – come across as more desperate endeavours. S Club seem to be ploughing on too soon after the sudden death of Paul Cattermole, and without Hannah Spearritt. Meanwhile, it’s hard not to view NSYNC’s recent single release and planned tour as a business move calculated with the sole purpose of rebooting Justin Timberlake’s career in the wake of the public’s reevaluation of how he treated ex-girlfriend Britney Spears.

But the Girls Aloud tour – planned for May/June 2024 – appears far less cynical and so far easier to celebrate. The bandmates have denied rumours that they’re cashing in by recording new music. It’s not like they need new material to pad out a show; their back catalogue is wall-to-wall hits. “Love Machine”, “Call The Shots”, “The Promise” and “Biology” were among the group’s 21 (I repeat… 21!) Top 10 tracks. During their time, they sold 4.3 million singles, a staggering amount for any band – let alone a seemingly disposable one formed on ITV’s one-time reality TV Show: Pop Stars: The Rivals.

Introduced to one another as competitors, it’s hardly surprising that there was some ego friction between the five singers: Cheryl Tweedy, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts, Nadine Coyle and Kimberley Walsh. The tension was in-built: a guarantee of soap opera headlines that would feed back into record sales and viewing figures. Their relationship was forged in the fire of public competition. This wasn’t a band who met on a bus – as the Rolling Stones did (another band to sort of reform in 2023 with their first studio album in 18 years) – bonding over mutual tastes. These were ambitious young women who first encountered each other as Hunger Games-style enemies in the arena of telly. The message was simple: Knock each other out, or form an alliance.

The music harnessed their fierce, fractious appetite for success. That debut single “Sound of the Underground” came skidding onto the charts in 2002 with its wheels sparking to an edgy clatter of drum and bass. Written by the songwriting team at Xenomania (who had also injected an industrial grinding edge into hits for Kylie, the Sugababes and Steps; the last two having also reunited recently), the track scored a critical acceptance rare for a reality TV show act. “A reality pop record that didn’t make you want to do physical harm to everyone involved in its manufacture,” gasped The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis. “‘Sound of the Underground’ features Fatboy Slim dynamics and an irresistible chorus.” The group would continue to shake things up, messing with pop formulae, all the while winking at the camera.

On songs like “Models” (2005), Girls Aloud simultaneously lapped up and sent up the celebrity world into which they’d been parachuted amid an era when Heat magazine ran relentless paparazzi snaps of pop stars falling into and out of nightclubs – circles highlighting any cellulite on their thighs. “Nothing at all robs my hunger/ Like a trip to the mall,” they pouted to the punch-snap, camera-flash of the song’s page-flipping synth beat.

But as Sarah Harding revealed in the memoir published shortly before her death, the women did also get lost in that shallow blur of fame. In Hear Me Out, Harding admitted that “somewhere – amongst the nightclubs, the frocks and hairdos, the big chart hits, and the glamour of being a pop star – the other Sarah Harding got utterly lost”.

The success kept coming, but the friction remained. In 2019, Nadine Coyle told The Sun that the group’s relationships were “fine at the start but there’s always politics in any band”. She claimed that the others had been jealous that she had been given more vocal lines, and so while she knew fans wanted “to think we’re best friends and we have pillow fights and, you know, drink milkshakes, that just wasn’t how it was”. Somewhat diplomatically, she added, “We’re all very, very different characters.” Girls Aloud split in 2013 – a decision they are believed to have made on the final night of their 2012 10-year reunion tour.

Egos aside, the women rallied around their bandmate in her final months, seeming to finally get their priorities straight. After Harding’s death, perhaps they had been reminded of how lucky they were and how much joy they could bring to their fans. Perhaps they could embrace all the frocks and hits as part of their core selves. Crucially, though,they didn’t move too fast after Harding’s death.

Cheryl told the BBC: “It hasn’t felt right, until now, to do anything without her. But now we feel strong enough, emotionally.” Kimberley Walsh added: “For us, it will feel very much like she’s there. She came alive on stage. That was the happiest she ever was. With grief, there’s definitely a shift where it’s like, ‘OK, you’re ready to celebrate that person.’” Their loss will bring a depth and poignancy to their bolshy-pouty hits when they strut onto the stage next summer. It’ll be in the way that they walk, the way that they talk. They’ll remind fans of the more innocent, pre-social media age from which they came. All the fun and all the tears allowed.