Teen-pop stardom is the ultimate sugar rush: sweet, disorienting and followed by an abrupt crash. "At one point six months ago, I was really down," says Joey (formerly Joe) McIntyre, ex-member of the Eighties all-boy sensation New Kids on the Block. "I couldn't even get meetings with managers. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't get arrested." Now that the pendulum has swung back to boy-band pop, however, McIntyre, 26, and fellow former New Kid Jordan Knight, 28, are launching solo careers. McIntyre has returned with Stay the Same, a new album of croony contemporary pop, slated for a March release. Knight's album leans toward up-tempo R&B. "I wanted to get away from the pop R&B thing" Knight says. "Although that's here I ended up."

After the New Kids split in 1994, Knight signed a deal with Interscope Records, but a deal was all he got. "They gave me free rein," he says. "But I didn't have anybody hat was hands-on at the record company. I'd just come in with new stuff and they'd say, 'That's good, but try some more songs. I'll see you back in a few months.' I was like, 'All righty!' " At the end of 1998, the singer took matters into his own hands. He co-financed collaboration with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and got a copy of his album on a Florida radio station. It began to play the Jam-Lewis track, "Give It to You," a song hat Knight describes as Timberland meets Sgt. Pepper's, which got the ball rolling.

McIntyre employed similarly grass-roots techniques. After a failed attempt at an acting career, he set out to record big-band music. "Not like Brian Setzer," he says. "More like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. I always liked that stuff. But he scrapped the idea on the advice of ex-Kid-turned-indie-actor Donnie Wahlberg and financed his solo pop album. After no record company showed interest, McIntyre sold 2,000 copies of it over his Web site and scheduled a few club gigs. "For a while I woke up telling myself 'If I sold 35 million records, man. I don't need to do this!' But that doesn't matter. It's, what have you got now?" After a radio station in his hometown of Boston started playing the album, McIntyre returned to the New Kids' label, Columbia Records.

Now both singers are back on the block, so to speak. "The pop market is wide open right now,' McIntyre says. "I don't mean to sound egotistical, but there's a void, just like there was for New Kids ten years ago. Of course, the big question in these revivalist times is whether the New Kids will reunite "Hee hee!" chuckles Knight. "We always joke about it." Adds McIntyre: "I wouldn't rule out a reunion, but we're not gonna dance around like we used to. Everyone can rest easy."

The unbridled success of boy bands like Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync would certainly support such an endeavor. "Those groups aren't doing anything different than we did." McIntyre says. "I walked into a Backstreet Boys show and did a double take."