Fresh off his tearful breakdown on stage at the debacle that was the 2015 VMAs, Bieber proved he can still best the biggest teenage heartthrobs du jour. The pop star’s new single What Do You Mean? has overtaken One Direction’s Drag Me Down for the honor of being the most streamed track ever on Spotify in a debut week, according to Billboard. In just five days, the 21-year-old’s first single from his upcoming November 13 record racked up 21 million streams, handily beating Drag Me Down’s 20 million.
Following his tears after the performance of What Do You Mean? at the VMAs, his first performance at the awards show since 2010, the singer explained his emotional moment on Jimmy Fallon. “I wasn’t expecting them to support me in the way they did,” he explained. “I’ve worked so hard at this album, I’ve worked so hard at just becoming the man I want to become and then, like, stepping into situations you can’t help but feel judged.”
Considering the pop singer’s run-ins with the law since 2013’s Journals, he probably feels pressured to give his fans a good impression. In 2014, he had multiple arrests for drunk driving, drag racing, and (yeah, this one’s tough to believe) throwing eggs at a neighbor’s house. And those incidents haven’t exactly played well with the public. Last April, there was even a petition — with 273,000 signatures — attempting to get the pop star deported from the country.
Apparently, though, his legion of female fans still love his songs. In addition to breaking the Spotify record, his new single brought home his first U.K. No. 1 hit. And Billboard expects that the track will also be his first chart-topping single in the U.S., as well.
As for the rest of the forthcoming record, expect the tunes be all about Bieber’s trials and tribulations in some form or another. “There’s some personal stuff and some ballads [on the album],” an unnamed source told Entertainment Weekly. “There’s some spoken-word moments with him literally talking about what he’s going through in his life. It’s all about the experience of being Justin Bieber.”
