Backstreet Boys’ 12-show Toronto run offers millennials a ticket to simpler times

When Chelsea Smith heard the Backstreet Boys were coming to Toronto, she had a simple message for the five men who soundtracked her childhood.

The 35-year-old Vancouver fan wasn’t bluffing. Having already travelled to Las Vegas to see her teenybopper crushes, she’s now preparing to fly across the country for two Toronto concerts, spending roughly $600 on tickets alone. And she’s hardly the only millennial willing to pay a tidy sum to party like it’s 1999.

Nearly three decades after their commercial peak, the Backstreet Boys have booked a staggering 12 shows at Toronto’s Rogers Centre in 2027, citing “overwhelming demand.” The run doubles the venue’s previous record of six shows, set by Taylor Swift during her Eras Tour in 2024.

While some current major artists are cancelling tours amid sluggish ticket sales, the once-baggy-jeaned quintet is proving nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

“I haven’t seen a Top 40 artist in so many years,” says Smith, a self-described “Y2K-era girlie” who made two trips to the Backstreet Boys’ Las Vegas Sphere residency last year.

“I feel like during COVID we all retreated back to our nostalgia,” says the customer support professional.

“Times are tough. You’re going back to when it was simpler and just living in that moment.”

Bill Welychka remembers when the Backstreet Boys could bring downtown Toronto to a standstill.

At the height of the boy-band craze in the late ’90s, the former MuchMusic VJ watched thousands of screaming teenagers descend on the channel’s Queen Street West headquarters, hoping to glimpse the five American heartthrobs.

“There were certain bands where we knew we’d have to hire security, where we would have to close the street down. The Backstreet Boys were certainly one of those bands,” he recalls.

“I think they fed off of that energy and the applause and the screams and the tears.”

The Toronto residency is dubbed “Into the Millennium — Homecoming: Live in Canada,” fittingly so: Canada was the first North American market to embrace the group.

Welychka remembers the frenzy spreading from Europe to Quebec, then across Canada, with MuchMusic putting their videos into heavy rotation.

But the boy-band bubble eventually burst. As tastes shifted in the 2000s, the Backstreet Boys faded from the charts, trading stadium-scale hysteria for more theatres and casinos.