“She was holding hands with Trevor/ Not the greatest feeling ever,” Kevin Parker famously sang on his Tame Impala track “The Less I Know The Better.” A much better feeling is likely to accompany the news that the psych-pop hit has notched two billion streams on Spotify. It’s Tame Impala’s first song to reach that milestone.
“The Less I Know The Better” took almost exactly 10 years to accumulate its billion streams. The song’s parent album, Currents, came out on July 17, 2015. Over the past decade, “The Less I Know The Better”—which was released as the album’s fourth and final single in November of that year—has emerged as the signature track from Currents and one of the definitive songs of Tame Impala’s career.
The song’s popularity was boosted by its music video. Directed by the Barcelona-based creative collective Canada, it features a male high school basketball player pining for a female cheerleader, who instead starts a relationship with the team’s mascot, a gorilla named Trevor (a callback to the aforementioned lyric). The video, which also boasts stunning psychedelic effects, has tallied 113 million views on YouTube.
Another big boost for the song came in March 2020, when listeners of Australia’s Triple J radio station voted it No. 1 in the Hottest 100 of the 2010s poll. The big win pushed “The Less I Know The Better” into Australia’s ARIA Top 50 for the first time. In an NME retrospective about Currents published in 2020, Parker reflected on the song’s eureka moment: “When I was writing it, I didn’t necessarily think it was the best song, but I knew that it ought to be a smash hit. I’ve never thought that about another song since that one.”
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