Playboi Carti’s ‘Sky’ Joins The Spotify Billions Club

The numbers remain astronomical for Playboi Carti’s “Sky.” The 2020 single, from Carti’s influential album Whole Lotta Red, has joined the Spotify Billions Club by surpassing a billion streams on the platform. It’s the rapper’s fifth song to reach the billion-streams milestone following “Magnolia” from his 2017 debut album, his irrepressible Travis Scott collab “FEIN!,” and a pair of tracks with the Weeknd, “Popular” and “Timeless.”

Powered by woozy synth chords from producer Art Dealer, “Sky” was released on Christmas of 2020 along with the rest of Whole Lotta Red. Four months later, the track got a music video from director Nick Walker that depicted Carti and associates (including Joy Divizn, Bam Margiela, Shane Gonzales, Mitch Modes, Clif Shayne, Destroy Lonely, Nico Ballesteros, and F1lthy) laying waste to a grocery store.

Although “Sky” never charted on the Billboard Hot 100, it has endured to become one of Carti’s best-loved tracks and biggest streaming hits. It’s earned Platinum status in countries all over the world, from Brazil to Poland to New Zealand, and has racked up more streams than any other Whole Lotta Red track by far.

A bold creative flourish in a career full of them, Whole Lotta Red has emerged as one of the most influential albums of the 2020s. Its aesthetic laid the groundwork for rage rap, one of the most popular and vital subgenres in hip-hop. “Whole Lotta Red functions like a pressure cooker,” began Paul A. Thompson’s Best New Music review at Pitchfork. “Playboi Carti takes an endless supply of bright and serrated beats and packs them together, end on end, so that the album seems to careen wildly toward an unknown destination. Those beats are then populated by the 24-year-old’s most outré, expressive vocals yet, a string of barks, ad-libbed shards, and crooned melodies that compound the mania.”

Buy Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red on vinyl here.