If We Ever Broke Up

Album: single release only (2023)
Charted: 13
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Songfacts®:

  • Kettering, Northamptonshire native Mae Stephens has been writing songs since the age of 12. After uploading cover songs to YouTube, she eventually released two original singles. On New Year's Eve 2022, she posted 15 seconds of "If We Ever Broke Up" on TikTok and watched it blow up.

    Stephens told BBC's Newsbeat she only put the snippet on TikTok as "a last-minute thing" when she was struggling for content. "I just I put on the brightest jumper I could, pulled the most awful dance moves," she said.

    To her surprise, Stephens woke up the next morning to find that her TikTok page had gone berserk and she was being slammed with messages.
  • After "If We Ever Broke Up" went viral, Stephens quit her job at Asda to be a full-time musician. She signed to Republic/Universal and released the song on February 10, 2023.
  • Over a wet synthline, Stephens throws shade at an ex. "It was written from the perspective of if I was still with my ex-boyfriend and, if I had the attitude and the experience that I do now when I was 16, I would have done all these things " she explained.
  • In the chorus, Stephens warns the boy, telling him if they break up, she'll tell his dad about how he treated her.

    "To say 'I'll call your dad,' that was something I wanted to do when I was younger but I never did it," she said. "And if I could go back, I would 100% call his dad and tell him everything."
  • Stephens wrote this slice of funky pop in Amsterdam in three hours at the end of a session with Dutch songwriter Gia Koka (Rita Ora's "Bang Bang," No Sleep's "Born To Lose") and Dutch producer Morgan Avenue (Glen Faria's "Zij Weet Het," S10's "Sorry"). "I'm used to doing heartbreak ballads," Stephens explained, "so to do something like this was a new page for me."
  • "If We Ever Broke Up" topped TikTok's 2023 Global Songs of the Summer list and finished runner-up behind Fifty Fifty's "Cupid" in the global list for the year, with 13.3 million video creations on the platform.

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