Maroon 5’s ‘Memories’ Joins YouTube Billion Views Club, While ‘Sugar’ Reaches Rarified Air
Written by djfrosty on February 7, 2024
Maroon 5 had two huge milestones to celebrate this week as two of the Adam Levine-led band’s music videos crossed major YouTube views milestones. First up, the band’s clip for the wistful single “Memories” from their Jordi album reached the one billion views mark.
The 2019 song about lost friends — inspired by the death of the band’s longtime manager Jordan Feldstein — peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. The spare visual directed by David Dobkin consists of a close-up shot of a mowhawked, bearded Levine in front of a black background singing the wistful refrain, “Here’s to the one’s that we got/ Cheers to the wish you were here but you’re not/ Cuz the dreams bring back all the memories of everything we’ve been through.”
The camera slowly pulls back to reveal Levine’s head and shoulders as the light fluctuates around him, eventually leaving the singer in the dark and ending with the phrase “For Jordi.”
In addition, the video for their 2014 single “Sugar” hit an even higher peak this week when it moved past four billion YouTube views. The song from the pop group’s fifth album, V — written by Levine along with Mike Posner, Dr. Luke, Jacob Hindlin and Henry Walter — also peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100.
The playful Wedding Crashers-inspired video directed by Dobkin was shot in Los Angeles and found the band seemingly crashing a series of weddings in a single day, tooling around in a vintage convertible and confusing bridges and grooms as they show up with their gear to play impromptu reception concerts to the delight of the gathered friends and families. The five-minute clip ends with Levine saying “this is the coolest thing ever, ever, ever, ever” while high-fiving and hugging a happy couple.
“Sugar” is the band’s first video to put up four billion views, edging ahead of their 2018 single “Girls Like You” (3.5 billion), another billion-view visual for “One More Night” and a handful of clips with 800 million-plus views (“Animals,” “Payphone,” “Moves Like Jagger”).
M5 have been in a lower-power mode since headlining the Super Bowl LIII halftime show in Atlanta in 2019, releasing the one-off singles “Memories,” “Nobody’s Love” (2020), the Megan the Stallion-featuring “Beautiful Mistakes” (2021) and last year’s “Middle Ground” while kicking off a Las Vegas residency at the Park MGM in March 2023. Though they’ve hinted at new music in the years since, M5 have not released a full-length album since 2021’s Jordi.
Their M5LV The Residency at the Dolby Live at Park MGM theater will continue this summer/fall, with 16 scheduled gigs in May, June, September and October.
Watch the “Memories” and “Sugar” clips below.