Girls Aloud

Despite originating as a prefabricated act assembled on the ITV series Popstars: The Rivals, Girls Aloud swiftly earned both commercial dominance and broad critical respect across the United Kingdom. The final five members selected through the show's elimination rounds were Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts, Cheryl Cole (née Tweedy), and Kimberley Walsh. The lineup coalesced in November 2002 and promptly launched an extended run of Top Ten singles that surpassed every previous benchmark set by an all-female group, a mark that held until the close of 2006, when their first greatest-hits collection, The Sound of Girls Aloud: The Greatest Hits, appeared. Their initial trio of studio albums—Sound of the Underground in 2003, What Will the Neighbours Say? in 2004, and Chemistry in 2005—also performed strongly, although the third of these peaked no higher than number 11 on the album chart. Momentum returned with the robust Tangled Up in 2007 and Out of Control in 2008, each matching the quality of the band's earlier work. Like the preceding two LPs, both were crafted solely by Brian Higgins and Xenomania, and Out of Control became the quartet's fourth chart-topping album in the U.K. Their second anthology, Ten, arrived in November 2012 and included four previously unreleased tracks. On September 5, 2021, vocalist Sarah Harding passed away from breast cancer in Birmingham, England, at the age of 39.