It’s the GAP ad heard around the world, the TikTok dances dominating your For You page, the reason your friend can’t stop saying “gnarly.” It’s the infectious melody you can’t get out of your head, the reason your baby cousin wants purple hair. Fictional girl group Huntr/x from the movie KPop Demon Hunters is at the heart of Netflix’s most-watched movie of all time and has just made history with the first No. 1 song by a girl group since Destiny’s Child in 2001. These are all phenomena attributed to the rise of global girl groups, Katseye and Huntr/x.
Girl groups have taken a backseat in recent years, where all that seems to dominate commercially are solo artists. Take the K-pop sensation BLACKPINK, for example. Together they are yet to achieve a No. 1 hit — yet, in their members’ respective solo careers, they’ve come much closer to topping the charts. BLACKPINK member ROSÉ gained her No. 1 hit with “APT.” featuring Bruno Mars back in October 2024. So why weren't girl groups performing well commercially in the 2000s and 2010s? And are they on the rise in the 2020s?
It doesn’t take much digging to understand why girl groups flopped in the 2000s and 2010s. From “creative differences” to mental health struggles, seemingly all successful girl groups eventually crumbled under the public eye. In 2005, Destiny’s Child, the iconic R&B group composed of Beyoncé Knowles, Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland, announced their breakup in a concert in Barcelona at the height of their success. The news surprised many fans, to be later followed up by an official statement claiming that they broke up because “each member wanted to pursue their personal goals and solo efforts in earnest.” Similarly, UK girl group, The Spice Girls, disbanded in late 2000 to early 2001 with the release of their third and final album Forever, also citing their pursuit of solo careers as the cause.
In the 2010s, Little Mix and Fifth Harmony were on the up and coming, hopefully marking a new future for girl groups. Little Mix was formed in 2011, when Jade Thirwall, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Jesy Nelson and Perrie Edwards won the eighth season of UK’s The X Factor. The X Factor UK is a popular reality TV competition where singers from England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland compete to see who has the “X Factor.” Since its debut in 2004, the show has been adapted to several different regions such as the US, Australia and Germany — garnering a reputation for spawning beloved names in the music industry like One Direction, Leona Lewis and, of course, Little Mix.
Little Mix was active from 2011 to 2021, releasing some absolute bops in their 10 years of making music together. Some of my favorites are “Love Me Like You,” the No. 1 UK hit “Shout Out to My Ex” and a song that altered my brain chemistry, “Black Magic.” Since 2021, their hiatus has been indefinite — mostly due to, you guessed it, a focus on solo projects. However, a great deal of their breakup was likely caused by the loss of a fourth of their band. Jesy Nelson had left Little Mix in December 2020 due to severe mental health struggles and body image issues, exacerbated by the external pressure of being in a girl group. During their hiatus, no member has particularly excelled as a solo artist, at least not nearly as much as they did when they were together.
Much like Little Mix, Fifth Harmony was formed just a year later in 2012, on the US version of The X Factor, its members being Camila Cabello, Lauren Jauregui, Ally Brooke, Normani and Dinah Jane. While the girls didn’t win their season, they did gain a record deal with Simon Cowell following their success. They went on to release three albums and many popular songs, including “Worth It,” “That’s My Girl,” yet another song that altered my brain chemistry, “All In My Head (Flex) Ft. Fetty Wap” and their highest charting song at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, “Work From Home.” After four years in Fifth Harmony, its most popular member, Camila Cabello, departed the group in 2016. In a recent interview on the podcast Call Her Daddy, Cabello opened up on why she left Fifth Harmony. She said, “I started distancing myself from the group vision, and it felt like you know they were still really passionate and into that, and so, I was just like, ‘I'm not happy here anymore, it doesn't feel aligned.” She promptly left the group to pursue songwriting and, drumroll please, a solo career! At least for Camila Cabello, going solo was the best decision she could have made for her career, as Fifth Harmony started going down in popularity after her departure, and she found herself at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with her song “Havana” becoming the best-selling single of 2018. Fifth Harmony announced their indefinite hiatus that same year in March so that each member could pursue their solo projects. The jokes write themselves.
Destiny’s Child, The Spice Girls, Little Mix and Fifth Harmony have all had reunion performances or “Greatest Hits” tours since disbanding. However, they haven’t produced new music together yet.
Now, in 2025, we have two successful girl groups at the forefront of the music industry, Katseye and Huntr/x. The people yearn for harmonies and choreography. While one is fictional (and therefore physically cannot disband for solo careers), Katseye will have to stand the test of time. Katseye was formed on a survival competition reality TV show on Netflix, Pop Star Academy: Katseye, stemming from a collaboration between music industry giants HYBE and Geffen Records in pursuit of starting a “global girl group.” What a “global girl group” entails is an all-female group of different ethnicities following the “K-pop formula” for the group's success. We can only hope they don’t suffer a similar fate as their “competition show” ancestors and continue blessing us with hypnotizing synchronized choreography and certified bops.
Paulina Delgado Umpierre is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at pmd99@cornell.edu
