Adele‘s music video for “Rolling in the Deep” has reached a fever pitch by becoming the singer’s second visual to reach two billion YouTube views. As of early Friday (March 25), the video has nearly 2,000,198,000 views.
Full of short-circuiting light bulbs and broken dinner plates, the Sam Brown-directed project matched the song’s composed anger so well it earned a spot on Billboard’s 2018 ranking of the 100 Greatest Music Videos of the 21st Century.
“The room full of glasses of water gently quaking to the bass drum heartbeat of ‘Rolling in the Deep,’ like Jurassic Park to the tenth power, was appropriately foreboding for what Adele’s 21 ended up being,” Billboard noted of the video, which placed 97th on the list. “A commercial behemoth the likes of which was supposed to have long gone extinct. It all starts here: Director Sam Brown capturing the once-in-a-generation vocalist at simultaneously her most vulnerable and her most powerful, unclear if the wreckage surrounding her is representative of her internal turmoil, or a direct result of it.”
The 33-year-old singer’s first video to hit the milestone was her 2015 visual for “Hello,” which still stands as the fastest video on the platform to reach one billion views. It needed just 87 days to overtake Psy’s record for “Gangnam Style,” and is currently just 40 million views shy of hitting the three billion mark.
In 2022, “Rolling in the Deep” remains one of Adele’s best charting singles. Not only was it her first song to top the Billboard Hot 100, it also spent seven weeks at No. 1 in 2011, and remained on the chart for 65 weeks. She’s achieved four more No. 1s since then, including “Hello” and the lead single off her most recent album 30, “Easy On Me” — both of which reigned on the chart for 10 weeks.
Relive one of 2011’s biggest hits by watching the “Rolling in the Deep” music video below:
