The Neighbourhood's 'Sweater Weather' Hits One Billion YouTube Views
The Neighbourhood's "Sweater Weather" has crossed one billion views on YouTube, placing the California rock band in a club that only a fraction of music videos ever reach. The band's official Instagram account celebrated the milestone on 9 August 2026, and Billboard confirmed the figure on 13 August 2026, noting that the song joins YouTube's Billion Views Club — a threshold first crossed by any artist in 2012, when PSY's "Gangnam Style" became the first video to ever hit the mark.
The official music video, directed by Zack Sekuler, was uploaded to YouTube in March 2013 as the lead single from The Neighbourhood's debut album I Love You. An earlier indie version of the video was unlisted after the band signed with Columbia Records, consolidating views on the official upload. That video has now accumulated roughly 9.6 million likes alongside its billion views.
"Sweater Weather" was the very first song The Neighbourhood wrote as a band, composed almost two years before its release on 28 March 2012. Fronted by Jesse Rutherford, the group watched the track reach No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the chart that tracks the most-consumed songs in the United States across streaming, radio and sales — while the parent album I Love You peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard 200, the equivalent album-sales chart.
The song refused to sit still. A 2020 resurgence on TikTok saw users turn "Sweater Weather" into code language for the queer community, with creators using the track in videos to come out as bisexual. The lyrics — including the line "One love, two mouths / One love, one house" — had already made the song an anthem for LGBTQIA+ groups, and the TikTok wave gave it a second commercial life. More than eight years after its initial release, the song debuted on the Billboard Global 200 — a chart measuring worldwide streaming and sales — peaking at No. 134 on the chart dated 7 November 2020.
What makes a billion-view milestone notable is the company it keeps. Bad Bunny leads globally with 20 music videos exceeding one billion YouTube views, followed by J Balvin with the second-most. Both artists built their billion-view tallies largely through the streaming era's Latin-music surge; The Neighbourhood, a rock act from Newbury Park, California, arrived at the same threshold through a different path — a 2012 single sustained by organic cultural adoption across more than a decade.
For a song that began as a band's first composition, carried one album to a mid-chart peak, and then found a second audience through a social platform eight years later, one billion views is less a single sprint than a long, layered accumulation. The video kept being watched because people kept finding reasons to play it.
