Liam Payne spent part of his last television job steering four strangers toward becoming a harmony group. On the panel of Netflix's Building the Band, filmed in 2024 weeks before his death in Buenos Aires, he gave them a piece of history. One Direction, Payne reminded the quartet then calling itself Soulidified, finished third on The X Factor before the rest of the world caught up. He had seen enough of his old band in these four to take them under his wing for the rest of the competition.

He also told them to find a simpler name. By the tenth episode they were performing as ICONYX, and in the finale they ran through *NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye." The judges sent them home in third place, and 3QUENCY beat SZN4 for the $500,000 prize.

On Friday (Oct 2), the band that lost released its major-label debut. "Man Ain't Me" is the first single from Shade Jenifer, Malik Heard, Bradley Rittmann and Landon Boyce since they signed with Atlantic Records. It arrives under the original name their fans pushed them to take back.

Can a group assembled for a streaming competition outlast the show that made it? Soulidified has better odds than most TV-born R&B acts, because losing left them no machine to lean on. They spent fourteen months building an audience by themselves before a label stepped in.

What Third Place Bought

The show's format already set this group apart from the reality bands that came before it. Singers picked their bandmates from separate booths, by voice alone, without seeing one another first.

Landon had already tried the other route, singing in Bout Last Night, a six-member boy band assembled by a management company. He applied to the Netflix series partly because he never got a say in who stood next to him onstage.

Netflix canceled Building the Band after one season, so there was no televised second act, no on-camera signing and no executive handing the group a finished album. In August 2025 the four released "One & Only" independently, and the song has since passed 5 million global streams.

"What's Your Name" followed earlier this year and has added more than 2 million of its own. That fall, the group spent the Bandemonium tour as the opening act, warming up crowds every night for the trio that had beaten them.

At the Nashville stop, the set included One Direction's "Little Things" as a tribute to Payne, according to a review in MTSU's student paper. One fan in the crowd told the paper she had binged the show with a friend and fallen for the group.

A surprise Usher cover at Netflix's Summer Break event kept the clips circulating between releases, and fans settled the name question too. The members dropped ICONYX after the show wrapped, and Shade told Netflix's Tudum that the original name "really does represent us well." In the same interview he compared the four of them coming together to the Avengers assembling, and the fan base now calls itself the Souldiers.

This summer the group opened for Khalid, and in August Atlantic announced the deal. "We know we're just getting started," the members said in a statement to Variety when the signing became public.

Atlantic Has Run This Play Before

The label knows the reality pipeline well. In 2005, MTV's Making the Band produced Danity Kane for Sean Combs and Bad Boy, whose releases went through Atlantic. The group became the first female act in Billboard history to see its first two albums debut at No. 1.

Day26 followed, chosen on camera at a season finale on Aug. 26, 2007, and named after the date. Its self-titled debut opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in March 2008, selling roughly 190,000 copies in its first week.

The lead single, "Got Me Going," stalled at No. 79 on the Hot 100. Both groups kept living in front of the cameras that created them, and Danity Kane came apart during a later season of the franchise that also followed Day26 on tour.

Every member of Danity Kane was eventually released from Bad Boy. Fans watched the breakup unfold as programming, the same way they had watched the group form. The name outlived the lineup anyway, and Aubrey O'Day and Dawn Richard released new music as a Danity Kane duo in 2020. Day26 also kept going after Bad Boy, landing with BMG in 2014.

The American X Factor offered a different template in 2012, when Fifth Harmony finished third and went on to outlast the show. Payne's band had occupied that same spot two years earlier in Britain.

Groups with no television platform face their own version of the problem. When London quartet No Guidnce split last month, its members said a loyal audience could not cover the cost of releasing the music they had finished.

What "Man Ain't Me" Is Built From

The single's credits map the two traditions this group keeps straddling. Troy Taylor produced it alongside U The Goat and Trop Killaz, and Taylor's resume includes work with SWV and Boyz II Men.

Two decades ago, he also brought Trey Songz to Atlantic through his Songbook imprint. Hiring him over a pop producer tells you the label is marketing a vocal group first and a boy band second.

The choreography comes from Marty Kudelka, Justin Timberlake's longtime choreographer, which writes the *NSYNC branch of the family tree directly into the moves. In Benji Allen's video, the four work overtime in an auto repair shop to win over a woman played by Brooklyn Van Zandt of Netflix's Dream Academy.

Landon takes the first verse. The song makes its pitch to a woman who already has someone, and the hook rests on one blunt claim that the other man cannot measure up.

That premise sits in a long R&B tradition of singing about being the better option. Boyz II Men worked that lane for decades, and their voices were heard last week trading harmonies with Lady A on a gospel single.

The competition setlist already showed where the group's instincts sit. Before "Bye Bye Bye," they sang Miguel's "Sure Thing" and Tevin Campbell's "Can We Talk."

The round that dropped them into the bottom two was a cover of SZA's "Saturn." The new single puts an R&B producer behind the record and a pop choreographer behind the body language, a split their television run had only hinted at.

The Questions Atlantic Still Has to Answer

The group announced the release date from its own stage, and fan accounts counted down until the video went live at midnight Eastern on Oct. 2. Coverage since then has been thin outside those accounts and a handful of R&B outlets. Atlantic has not announced an album, a tour or a second single.

That leaves Soulidified in a position Day26 never faced, needing to win listeners who never saw a single episode. Their head start is a fan base that stayed with them through a year when no network was paying for the story.

Payne's comparison to One Direction sounded generous in 2024. The next twelve months will show whether the Souldiers can carry a debut single onto the charts the way Day26's viewers once carried an album.