When boy-band hitmakers LFO (for Lyte Funkie Ones) get onstage nowadays, they have more than a few good-timey hit songs to deal with. They also have an emotional, sometimes tragic history to explore.

“It takes my breath away, to be honest with you,” says Brad Fischetti, the sole survivor of the original trio. “I don’t get through one show without almost being on the floor in tears — and then I say, ‘Now I’ve got to do this again tomorrow night’.  But if I’m going to tell the story authentically, I have to tell the hard stuff too. And we get people crying, but in the end they’re happy tears.”

Breaking out of New Bedford in the mid ’90s, LFO (Fischetti, Rich Cronin and Brian Gillis, replaced by Devin Lima) marked a new generation of rap/R&B-inspired boy bands; to them the New Kids on the Block were old school.

“Less for me because I grew up in New Jersey, but I know Rich had a connection to them. And anyone who was interested in music back then looked up to the New Kids and Marky Mark as something to aspire to be. To me Donnie Walhberg is the GOAT in terms of doing everything right.”

One big difference was that LFO wrote its own breakthrough hit, “Summer Girls,” which gave them some autonomy when they signed to a major label. “We wrote a smash hit song, so we could demand respect because we’d actually earned it. ‘Summer Girls’ changed our trajectory in that way; we weren’t a boy band in the same way the Backstreet Boys or ‘NSync were. We would have had a couple of modest hits and then we would have been done; just doing what we were told to do. And that did happen sometimes; there were a couple of songs on that second album that we weren’t too keen on.”

The millennium brought a string of reunion tours, but also a string of losses. Cronin took part in a trio tour after being diagnosed with leukemia; but passed away in 2010. Lima followed due to adrenal cancer in 2018; and Gillis also passed after his departure from the group. Reviving LFO was the last thing on Fischetti’s mind, but he met the group O-Town while taking part in the longrunning Pop 2000 tour. A friendship developed and O-Town singer Trevor Penick is now filling some of the gap in LFO.

“To my mind O-Town is the closest thing I’ll ever have to playing with Rich and Devin again. When we started doing Pop 2000 together I’d see O-Town giving each other handshakes before shows, saying they loved each other — I missed having that.”

This led to his reviving LFO. “I’ve had people say, ‘Your bandmates are dead and you weren’t the main singer, so what are you doing up there?’ But I’ll keep doing this as long as most people appreciate it. LFO will always be three guys; I just have the unfortunate honor of keeping the legacy alive.”

During the COVID shutdown Fischetti began drafting the songs and memories into a “story of LFO” show, which they’re bringing to City Winery on Sunday. “There’s a lot of the music that shaped us, music of the time. It’s a two-hour roller coaster of a show — I tell personal stories about how the band came together — and about mental health, losing my faith and getting it back again. My story in that sense isn’t much different from anybody else’s, the difference is my job and that I have a platform to talk about it.”