Meet the New Spice Girls: Little Mix

Scary, Sporty, Baby, Posh and Ginger have been knocked from their throne by a new British girl group that’s preparing to invade our great land: the band Little Mix’s album DNA debuted at Number 4 on the top 200 chart this week, which is “the highest debut ever for a British female group’s first album” since the Spice Girl’s super spicey Spice dropped at Number 6 in 1997. But who are these imposters jostling for the crown of pop?

What we’ve learned as we’ve grappled with this upsetting news: Little Mix won The X Factor in Britain in 2011, performing a cover of Damien Rice’s “Cannonball.” Their original band name was Rhythmix (yuck). The four girls are all allegedly 19-21 (they look so much older!). They have been mentored by pop grandfather Simon Cowell, who tweeted his congratulations to them today. One of their members of the group has dealt with stupid internet hate for being too fat. They all have good voices but their songs sound more like Girls Aloud than the Spice Girls. A number of their singles clock in at almost four minutes long, which feels excessive for a pop song. They recorded a song with Missy Elliott that should be so much better than it is (Missy, come back to me).

My opinion, honed from years of careful girl group study, is that DNA is no Spice, which featured several of the most perfect pop singles ever written: “Wannabe”, “Say You’ll Be There”, “2 Become 1”, “Who Do You Think You are” and even the super weird “Mama.”

If you’re over all this griping from the Olds about how things will never be as good as they used to be, and you miss the glory days when the world was a Spice World, you can check out Little Mix on Good Morning America this Friday, which will be their first American television appearance. The one thing that comforts me about this latest development is that the last girl group that did this well on the charts was Danity Kane and look at how well they’re doing.