A couple decades ago, Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys were two of the biggest acts not just in music, but in entertainment overall. In 1999, Backstreet Boys had their first No. 1 album with Millennium, and Spears’ debut, …Baby One More Time, also topped the charts that year. Now, the two acts have brought a dose of the late ’90s/early ’00s to a year when people want to be in any time but now, as they have collaborated on a new song, “Matches.”
The track arrives on a new deluxe edition of Spears’ 2016 album Glory and it’s a rock-solid bit of thumping pop. Lyrically, the song is about an exciting romance, with the Boys singing, “Oh, if they dusted me for prints / They’d find you all over me / All you all over me / Nothing ever quite felt like this / Our fire is killing me / The good kind of killing me.” Dua Lipa collaborator Ian Kirkpatrick is one of the song’s producers, and he’s also a co-writer on it alongside frequent pop star collaborator Justin Tranter.
Listen to “Matches” above.
Glory (Deluxe) is out now via RCA. Get it here.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.