Niall Horan, Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne of One Direction. (WENN.COM)

As long as there are teenage girls, there will be boy bands. So cue the screams for Tuesday's arrival of One Direction's sophomore album, Take Me Home.

The U.K. group is the current frontrunner in a field that includes another U.K. troupe, The Wanted, and Nickelodeon's Big Time Rush.

And they are just the latest in a decades-long list of similarly shriek-inducing male vocal groups: from The Osmonds, The Jacksons, and The Monkees in the '60s to the Bay City Rollers and Menudo in the '70s to New Edition and New Kids on the Block in the '80s to the so-called boy band golden era of the '90s that featured Boyz II Men, Take That, *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Hanson, and Canada's own The Moffatts.

A few facts about all things One Direction-related:

Take Me Home's lead single, Live While We're Young, which borrows its riff from The Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go, had the biggest opening-week sales figures south of the border for any non-U.S. act in history.

The black and white video for the follow-up single, Little Things, an acoustic ballad written by Ed Sheeran, currently has just over 20 million hits on YouTube.

1D's 2013 shows in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal have been sold out since they were announced last spring.

When the group, who all auditioned separately for The X-Factor in the U.K. before being thrown together by Simon Cowell, appeared again in front of Cowell on the U.S. version of the show last Thursday they were billed as "the biggest boy band on Earth." Then again, what else would Cowell call them?