Tame Impala’s ‘Borderline’ Joins Spotify Billions Club
The single led the musical project’s fourth album in 2019, and becomes their second song to cross the milestone.
“Borderline,” the lead single from Kevin Parker’s fourth Tame Impala album The Slow Rush, just crossed a major streaming milestone. The song has crossed one billion streams on Spotify, becoming the second Tame Impala track to achieve the milestone; the other, “The Less I Know The Better” from the 2015 album Currents, has well over 2 billion streams. “Borderline” joins just about 1,000 songs on the entire platform to cross the milestone.
Impressively, “Borderline” made it into the Billions Club without the help of a music video. However, Tame Impala did perform the track widely after its debut, bringing the song to the stages of Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and Coachella in 2019. The track also remains a staple of their live shows, being performed during The Slow Rush Tour and in the Deadbeat Tour, which kicked off earlier this year in Brooklyn.
Originally released in 2019, “Borderline” heralded a new era for Parker’s musical project. After the enormous success of Currents, the musician spoke about some difficulties finishing his next album on a specific time table. “When I was making this one, I had to embody a bit of a Kanye West perspective on it, which is like, it’s finished when it’s finished,” he told Uproxx at the time. “I wanted to try and use things from totally different worlds in the way that a hip-hop producer would. To be almost collage-y. Make a soundscape and build a song from there.” The resulting music, including “Borderline,” tapped into synthesizers and disco, with Parker naming Pharrell Williams and Supertramp as reference points while recording.
Since the release of The Slow Rush, Tame Impala has only seen more success. The fifth album from the project, Deadbeat, was released this past October, featured major singles “End Of Summer,” “Dracula,” and “Loser,” and topped both the Billboard Rock and Dance charts. Tame Impala also contributed music to the soundtracks for Barbie, Elvis, and Minions: The Rise Of Gru.
