Member of Huge Newly Reunited Girl Group Once Sang in '90s Post Grunge Band

The early 2000s girl group The Pussycat Dolls have announced a 20th anniversary reunion tour for their PCD debut album and dropped a new track called "Club Song," but did you realize the lead singer for the group actually started her career with a big '90s post-grunge band?

Nicole Scherzinger found her greatest success with Pussycat Dolls, but actually got her start in the music scene by singing and touring with '90s alt-rock hitmakers Days of the New.

How Nicole Scherzinger Got Her Start With Days of the New

The future music star was on the path to an entertainment career early on, starting acting at the age of 14 and studying musical theater while attending Wright State University. While in college, she had appeared in regional productions of Chicago, Guys and Dolls and Show Boat and it was during her time in college that she was first noticed by Days of the New frontman Travis Meeks.

After a successful debut album, Meeks was in the process of working on the band's second self-titled offering (referred to as the "green" album) when he eventually hired Scherzinger to lend vocal assistance to some of the material he'd been working on.

"So I hired her. I hired her to record the [album] and I wrote [all] the parts for her and she sung backup pretty much on one, two, three, four, five, six – six songs on the record," recalled the singer previously to HipHopDx. "But her vocals were not [buried] way back in the background, it was like me and her singing, like, left to right, like strong."

On the green album, Scherzinger's contributions can be heard on such tracks as "Flight Response," "The Real," "Take Me Back Then," "Phobia of Tragedy," "Bring Yourself" and "Last One."

Days of the New, "Take Me Back Then"

What Nicole Scherzinger Said About Her Time With Days of the New

Previously reflecting on her time with Days of the New with BBC Radio 2's Ken Bruce, Scherzinger recalled, "I was in a rock band. Little known fact, called the Days of the New. We toured with bands like Foo Fighters and Bush. That was my first real, real gig."

"We were pretty legit. I sang like these crazy chanting things, like celtic chants. I actually did that in the band and I had this whistle range and would sing these crazy high notes and dress in all goth. It was really cool," she added. "There’s a whole other side of me that people don’t know. But that how I got started was in that band, that acoustic rock band Days of the New."

READ MORE: 5 Acoustic Songs That Are Super Heavy

But Scherzinger, who was 19 at the time and dropped out of college to take the gig, was not necessarily a fan of the rock touring life at that point in her life.

"I didn't like on tour though. I'd come from the theater. I was used to people sitting down and it being silent and people holding on to every note that I sang with bravado and crescendo and decrescendo," she recalled. "And then I join this rock band and everyone's smoking. I'm doing proper legit operatic warmups in the background and people are screaming and throwing beer bottles and I was like, 'What is this world?'"

What Travis Meeks Recalled of Nicole Scherzinger's Time With Days of the New

Though their working relationship started strong, Meeks told HipHopDX that he and Scherzinger grew apart creatively over the course of her time in the band. While stating that she "didn't seem to understand music very well," he did credit her as "an amazing entertainer" and was generally positive about their time spent together.

Where Else You Might Know Nicole Scherzinger From

While the Days of the New gig didn't pan out, it was only the start of Scherzinger's career. She would go on to take part in a WB talent competition called Popstars that eventually put together a girl group called Eden's Crush. The band would have some marginal success in the early 2000s.

But her eventual breakout came with Pussycat Dolls, who started in the mid-'90s as s neo-burlesque dance troupe and later evolved into a music group bringing in Scherzinger, Melody Thornton and Kaya Jones as singers for the outfit. They released two studio albums — 2005's PCD and 2008's Doll Domination. Scherzinger would take lead on the band's breakout single "Don't Cha," and also sang on such big charting singles as "Stickwitu" and "Buttons."

After Pussycat Dolls, Scherzinger ventured out with a solo career, has been one of the panelists on TV's The Masked Singer and has returned to the theater where she won a Laurence Olivier Award as Best Actress as Norma Desmond in the 2023 musical Sunset Boulevard and received a Tony Award for the same role in 2025.

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