After the 2000 release of the Backstreet Boys' previous album, Black and Blue, the group faced some tough times. Nick Carter was arrested for drunk driving (he pleaded not guilty in April), AJ McLean went to rehab and ticket sales for the Black and Blue tour were disappointing. The band sued its label, Zomba, for $75 million, claiming that executives weren't supportive of its future. And the group's boy-band peers went kaput, with Justin Timberlake's solo success leaving 'NSync sunk and Nick Lachey discovering that being Jessica Simpson's hubby is a hotter gig than 98 Degrees. "It's been four years," says Carter. "You don't really know if people are still going to care."

Apparently they do: Like it or not, the Boys are poised for a comeback. "Incomplete," the first single off the new Never Gone (out on June 14th), was added to 116 of the country's Top Forty radio stations when it was released in April. The video has taken up residency on MTV's Total Request Live and climbed to the top of AOL's most-viewed-clips chart.

But the record almost never happened. It wasn't until a December 2003 meeting, says co-manager Johnny Wright, that the group and label management sat down at a Las Vegas hotel, hashed out differences and started recording Never Gone, hiring a powerhouse suite of producers: longtime collaborator Max Martin (who co-produced Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone"), Billy Mann (Pink's "God Is a DJ") and John Shanks (Michelle Branch's "Everywhere"). "We knew we were battling with the odds against us," says Zomba president Barry Weiss. "We made extra sure we had a great body of work."

With the success of "Incomplete" -- a Bryan Adams-ish ballad that sets the tone for the album, which veers from the band's teeny-bop roots into adult-contemporary territory -- the work seems to have paid off. A month before its release, Never Gone is already among the top thirty pre-sale CDs at Amazon.com. A recent theater tour sold out in minutes, and the band is planning an amphitheater tour for July.

"Success is a little sweeter this time around," says Carter. "Right now in our careers, it has to be about the music. We're all older. People in the group are married. One guy's out of rehab. If we don't have a frickin' hit, this ain't going nowhere."