Maroon 5

“I think it’s been the full-circle journey so far, as far as the ways in which we made music and how we did it and where it took us,” Maroon 5 leader Adam Levine told Apple Music more than two decades into the group’s career. Made up primarily of old high-school friends, the band formed in Los Angeles in the early 2000s after an earlier—and musically unrelated—incarnation called Kara’s Flowers failed to launch. Influenced by Levine’s then-recent baptism in hip-hop music and culture, 2002’s Songs About Jane was a slow burn, taking about two years to reach the upper end of the charts. (Singles “This Love” and “She Will Be Loved” reached the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 in 2004.) The band toured relentlessly, venturing further into soul and Prince-style pop rock for 2007’s It Won’t Be Soon Before Long (which earned them their first chart-topper, “Makes Me Wonder”), adding both polish and power for 2010’s Hands All Over. In 2011, Levine started serving as a coach on The Voice, launching his own celebrity while expanding the band’s reach even further. Five more full-lengths followed, including 2025’s Love Is Like. (“It’s funny because the music that we wound up making feels really fresh and cool,“ Levine said of the release.) And even as they ascended to megastardom, Maroon 5 has managed to retain a sense of edge and sexuality, while simultaneously remaining one of the 21st century’s few mainstream bands able to keep pace with the innovations of electronic music and hip-hop.