One Direction and Harry Styles

Five teenagers (Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson) formed One Direction in London in 2010. They became the first major success story of the age of social media. They released five albums starting with Up All Night (2011), containing their signature bubblegum-pop song What Makes You Beautiful as well as One Thing, and Take Me Home (2012), containing Kiss You, Summer Love and especially Live While We're Young (2012). Their success was mostly due to What Makes You Beautiful and Live While We're Young, both penned by a trio of veteran songwriters/producers (Rami Yacoub, Carl Falk, Savan Kotecha).

They abandoned the most overtly childish tones of their ditties on Midnight Memories (2013), the world's best-selling album of the year, with Midnight Memories, Best Song Ever and Story of My Life, the latter two penned by another group of songwriters (Wayne Hector, John Ryan, Ed Drewett and Julian Bunetta), Four (2014), with Night Changes, which made them the first band ever to top the Billboard charts with each of its first four albums on their first week of release, and Made in the A.M. (2015), when Malik had already quit, with Wolves, If I Could Fly, Perfect and Olivia. Theirs were some of the most obnoxious songs in the history of pop music.

As of 2020, they claimed to have sold a total of 70 million records (although it's not clear what "record" means in the 2010s).

The group then disbanded and each member went on to tedious solo careers.

Harry Styles debuted solo with Harry Styles (2017), containing the David Bowie-esque hit Sign of the Times, followed by Fine Line (2019), with the singles Lights Up and Watermelon Sugar.

Zayn Malik launched his solo career with Mind of Mine (2016), and its lead single, Pillowtalk, which topped both the US and British charts upon its release. After collaborating with Taylor Swift for I Don't Wanna Live Forever and Sia for Dusk Till Dawn, Malik released a second album, Icarus Falls (2018), containing a whopping 27 songs (one worst than the other), and then Nobody Is Listening (2021), two albums of sex songs that, at best, attempted a smooth trap-soul fusion. Few singers in the history of pop music have released such hollow albums, and rarely has a pop star had such a passion-less phrasing.

Harry Styles' third album Harry’s House (2022) is a sleepy experience drowning in slick arrangements of synths and horns that make Steely Dan sound like a rock band. The hyped single was As It Was, and the 1980s are all over dance-pop tunes like Music for a Sushi Restaurant, Grapejuice and Satellite. The sparse Matilda for voice and guitar actually displays some artistic value.