If you've avoided mall radio and glimpses of Billboard charts over the past couple months, know that One Direction and The Wanted are British-Irish crews battle-tested in the U.K. before being shipped over here. For all the talk of a rivalry between them, the two groups actually have the market rather neatly divided. One Direction are Nice Guys, boys entranced by a girl's ponytail flip. The Wanted are Bad Boys, men pretending to booze, fight, and fuck their way through the battle of the sexes when really they just want to get home to their girlfriends. The result is, as you'd expect, effective but bloodless pop.

One Direction, in their tight-fit suiting and J. Crew leisure-wear, look like the kind of boys who could put shotgun-and-shovel wielding dads at ease. But when it comes to pitching their core audiences, they're as clueless as Charlie, the overweeningly sweet boyfriend on HBO's Girls who's so busy being kind and respectful that he becomes deathly boring. When they admonish a girl to "get out, get out, get out of my head" in "One Thing," the band members are careful not to suggest that she fall into their beds, much less to name that "one thing" that teenage girls are always warned teenage boys want from them.

Their biggest hit yet, "What Makes You Beautiful," is so worshipful that it feels smothering. The entire track is in praise of a girl who fails to see her own attractiveness—it's a compliment laced with condescension. "Gotta Be You," though, may be the most unsettling song in the group's ouvre. It portrays the girl the song is directed towards as ruined by the singer: "Girl, what a mess I made upon your innocence," Liam Payne croons. "Now girl, I hear it in your voice and how it trembles." But he wants another chance—"If you walk away / I'll fade / Cuz there's nobody else." It's as manipulative as any good love song, but stricken with a fatal dose of self pity.

The Wanted, by contrast, depend on frontman Max George's Mancunian-bro glower to bolster the impression that the members of the band have actually lain with women. The group uses that license to turn out songs like "Glad You Came"—yes, it's a double entendre—an ode to partying in Ibiza that includes the somewhat worrisome triplet "Now I'll take you by the hand / Hand you another drink / Drink it if you can." In contrast to One Direction's soft-focus scene setting, The Wanted can be shockingly specific. "Lightning" pictures a man and a woman making out at a party, "Just you and me and the coats in the back room / Learning things they don't teach in classrooms."

But The Wanted's horndog pose is just a front for the traditional storybook view of romance. "All Time Low" tells us that "Praying won't do it / Hating won't do it / Drinking won't do it / Fighting won't knock you out of my head." Love's powerful to these guys for the way it both elicits pleasure and agony. On "Lose My Mind," they explain that "If heartache was a physical pain, I could face it, I could face it / But you're hurting me from inside of my head, I can't take it, I can't take it."