Taylor Swift secured her 12th No. 1 hit on Billboard‘s Pop Airplay chart with “Cruel Summer.” According to Billboard, the 2019 track hitting the top of the chart crowns Swift as the artist with the most Pop Airplay No. 1’s in the chart’s history.
Videos by American Songwriter
The feat is made all the more impressive given that the song was released on Lover, which is not the album she is currently promoting. Upon its original release in 2019, “Cruel Summer” and the rest of Lover were impeded by the COVID-19 pandemic which ensued just a few months after the song’s initial release.
Thanks to the song’s resurgence on TikTok and in her Eras Tour setlist, Swift decided to make the song a single. “‘Cruel Summer,’ that song was my pride and joy on that album,” Swift said earlier this year. “That was my favorite song. You have conversations before the album comes out and everyone around weighs in on what they think should be singles and I was finally about to have my favorite song become the single off of ‘Lover.’
“And I’m not trying to blame the global pandemic that we had, but that is something that happened that stopped ‘Cruel Summer’ from ever being a single,” she continued.
[RELATED: We Asked AI to Write the Plot of a Taylor Swift Biopic and Cast the Film]
Swift has been breaking records left and right this year. Now racking up her 12th No. 1 on Billboard‘s Pop Airplay chart, Swift surpasses Maroon 5, Katy Perry and Rihanna, who each have 11 Pop Airplay No. 1 hits, according to Billboard. Meanwhile, the singer’s latest release, the re-recorded version of Speak Now, broke two Spotify records: the most streamed album in a single day and most streamed country album in a single day.
“I first made Speak Now, completely self-written, between the ages of 18 and 20,” Swift wrote on Instagram when she announced the release. “The songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions, and wild wistfulness. I love this album because it tells a tale of growing up, flailing, flying and crashing … and living to speak about it.”
Prior to that, her Midnights track “Anti-Hero” made her the first artist in history to top Billboard‘s Radio Songs chart in the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s.
Currently, Swift has four albums in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 Albums chart, making her the first woman to have achieved that goal since 1963. The charting albums are Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Lover, Midnights, and Folklore.
(Photo by John Shearer/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)
