Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes and Taylor Swift claims another number one song.
“Cruel Summer,” from Swift’s 2019 album, Lover, is number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart four years after its release.
This marks Taylor’s 10th number one on the chart. Additionally, Billboard reports that “Cruel Summer” had the fifth-longest trip to the summit in the history of the chart, in terms of the time from its debut to finally reaching the top.
So, what led to this result? To quote another song from Lover, it’s been a long time coming for Swifties. A fan-favorite track, it’s been theorized “Cruel Summer” was set to be a single before the pandemic put an end to the Lover era in early 2020. It opens The Eras Tour as the first song Taylor sings all the way through, and it also opens the corresponding Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film, which is doing major business theatrically.
Streaming numbers for all of Taylor’s music increased in the week after the film’s release. Additionally, Taylor put out two new versions of the song, “Cruel Summer (Live from Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour)” and “Cruel Summer (LP Giobbi Remix),” which she bundled together in an EP called The Cruelest Summer. Streams of those versions also count toward the overall Hot 100 tally.
In other Taylor news, we now have our first photo of her kissing her new flame, Travis Kelce. Chariah Gordon posted Instagram photos of her with her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Mecole Hardman, Jr., Travis and Taylor, taken after the Chiefs game against the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday. In one of the photos, Taylor leans up to kiss Travis on the cheek as he smiles for the camera.
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