In Memoriam - Girls Aloud, 2002-2013

All good things must come to an end.

In one of the world's least surprising but still nonetheless saddening music revelations, just hours after departing the stage for the final night of their Ten: The Hits Tour in Liverpool, Girls Aloud announced via Twitter that they were pulling down the curtains for good on their time as a band. In some ways, it's perhaps best that this happened due to the rather half-assed way they went about with promoting the Ten album and the inescapable feeling that their musical relationship with Xenomania was sputtering below the standards of its once unstoppably brilliant results. At the same time, it would have been nice to have had at least one more full studio album out of the Girls, because in all honesty I am never going to fully accept the fact that the half-baked Out of Control has now become Girls Aloud's final studio LP.

There is one consolation, however: the fact that we have ten years of quite simply the most inventive pop music to ever emerge from a recording studio anywhere in the world. Admittedly, their first album we haven't paid much attention to aside from "Sound of the Underground" and "No Good Advice", but What Will the Neighbours Say?, Chemistry, and Tangled Up are three albums of such genius perfection, while the rather disappointing Out of Control still has at least three stone-cold pop classics, most notable "Untouchable". For any pop group in this day and age to have three fantastic albums and one rather-good-but-not-great album is a feat that most likely won't be rivaled anytime soon.

Now that it's all over, the proper thing to do is to reflect on just how amazing Girls Aloud were over the course of ten years. When one really takes into account their full musical catalogue, it almost becomes too overwhelming for any obsessive pop fan (myself included) to comprehend with a sound mind. I can distinctly remember still the first time I realized the brilliance of songs like "The Show", "Biology", "Something Kinda Ooooh", "Call The Shots", "Untouchable"...and that's just the big hits. That doesn't even count the other singles, the album tracks, the B-sides...again, far too much to analyze all at once. To simplify things in the best way possible, here are fifteen of my favorite Girls Aloud songs -

15. On The Metro


14. Miss You Bow Wow


13. Watch Me Go


12. Singapore


11. It's Magic


10. Memory of You


9. Love Machine


8. Girl Overboard



7. Call The Shots



6. Graffiti My Soul


5. Something Kinda Ooooh



4. Control of the Knife



3. Untouchable


2. The Show


1. BIOLOGY


There are plenty more, of course, and some I like more depending on my mood and certainly the bottom five or six songs could be reshuffled with other songs at a moment's notice, but the top five is rock solid in terms of how each of these songs solidified my obsession with Girls Aloud, an obsession that began back in 2005.

R.I.P. Girls Aloud, your sweet music will be missed...