Look who’s back in the rankings: Stromae
Two years ago he shocked everyone singing his suicidal thoughts live on French TVon the notes of “L’enfer”, the first preview of an album, “Multitude”, which fans have been waiting for for nine, very long years. For Stromae the worst seemed to be over after that the long struggle with the demons and monsters of depression, panic attacks and mental disorders against whom the Belgian singer-songwriter had fought for years, after the great success with “Alors on danse”, “Papaoutai” and “Formidable”.
It was just an illusion. Right at the best moment, when Paul Van Haver – this is the artist’s real name – had finally returned to perform live.waved the white flag again, canceling last year’s entire European tour: “Stromae’s health status does not allow him to perform the remaining concerts, marking the premature end of the Multitude Tour,” the organizers’ note read. Now Stromae emerges from his lair. And he does it with a song that seems to represent his rebirth not only personally, but also artistically, after the numbers below expectations of “Multitude” (in France it “stopped” at 300 thousand copies sold: one sixth of the 2 million of the best seller Racine carrée). “But meilleure ennemie”, in duet with the French singer-songwriter Pommereal name Claire Isabelle Geo Pommet, born in 1996 (this summer she opened Lana Del Rey’s concert at the Parisian festival Rock en Seine), it’s literally taking off in the charts and on TikTok. Redeeming a career, that of Stromae, which seemed to have stopped after “Tous le mêmes”, the singer-songwriter’s last real hit (it was 2014).
The song is part of the soundtrack of one of the Netflix titles of the momentthe second season of the series “Arcane – League of Legends”, based on Riot’s iconic “League of Legends” video game. Stromae and Pomme wrote it specifically for the series, in which it is the backdrop to one of the key scenes (songs by Twenty One Pilots, Linkin Park and King Princess can also be heard in the various episodes). The song tells of a toxic love, from which the two protagonists are unable to separate themselves: “The worst of blessings, the most beautiful of curses / I should walk away from you, but as the saying goes / rather than being alone, it’s better to be in bad company,” they sing.
“Ma meilleure ennemie” was released last November 23rd and immediately proved to be a streaming success, also driven by TikTok. Suffice it to say that on Monday 25 November, that is to say just two days after its release, the song it totaled something like 5.97 million streams worldwide in twenty-four hours. A record. Never before, in fact, had a French-speaking song recorded such a quantity of plays all in a single day.
In the last week “Ma meilleure ennemie” has scored 31.3 million listeners worldwidethus placing itself in eleventh place in the Weekly Top Songs Global, the ranking of the most listened to songs in the world on Spotify: surpassing in just one week hits such as “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter, “Wildflower” by Billie Eilish and “Good luck, babe !” by Chappell Roan. And from the day of its release to today it already amounts to a lot 87.7 million the number of listens collected on Spotify globally.
