Just in time for fall, The Neighbourhood have hit a big milestone: The California rock band has joined YouTube’s Billion Views Club with their 2012 alternative hit “Sweater Weather.”
The Jesse Rutherford-fronted band released “Sweater Weather” as the lead single from their 2013 debut studio album, I Love You. The album peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard 200, while the track reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. A previous indie music video was released alongside the song when it dropped, but that version was unlisted after they signed with Columbia Records.
The official music video was uploaded to YouTube in March 2013, during the era of Tumblr aesthetics, at a moment when “indie sleaze” and soft-grunge subcultures were found on the platform.
The track’s milestone lands The Neighbourhood among other record-holders including Bad Bunny — who is in the lead globally with 20 music videos with more than 1 billion views — as well as J Balvin, who is the artist with the second-most entries. PSY’s “Gangnam Style” was the first video to ever reach 1 billion views on the platform in 2012.
Following its initial release, “Sweater Weather” later became an anthem for LGBTQIA+ groups because of lyrics such as “One love, two mouths/ One love, one house.” The track experienced a resurgence in 2020 when TikTok users turned the song into code language for the queer community, and various creators used it to come out as bisexual to their followers on the platform. The popularity of “Sweater Weather” that year and its use on the platform brought a streaming resurgence that led to it debuting on the Billboard Global 200 more than eight years after its release, scaling the list for four weeks before peaking at No. 134 on the chart dated Nov. 7, 2020.
