“Walking On Sunshine,” the eternally-optimistic track from Katrina And The Waves, has officially joined the Spotify Billions Club, more than 40 years after its debut. The track joins the upper echelon of streaming hits on the platform, having crossed one billion streams in June 2026.
The track was the brainchild of Katrina and the Waves’ guitarist Kimberley Rew, who described it as “it’s just a piece of simple fun, an optimistic song, despite us not being outstandingly cheery people. We were a typical young band, insecure and pessimistic.” Still, he told The Guardian in 2015, “There was an element of synchronicity to how it took off: it came out at the beginning of a very hot summer in 1985. We were on our first – and only – American club tour when it entered the charts. Suddenly, whenever we played it, everyone went nuts.”
People still go nuts for “Walking On Sunshine.” The track ended up being a top ten hit in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Ireland. Though lead singer Katrina Leskanich admits she found the song incredibly annoying at first, she’s also come to love it. “The song changed my life. I’ve ended up adoring it,” she reflected. “It’s been used in films – from American Psycho to bloody Daddy Day Care – and it’s even been covered by Dolly Parton. People are always coming up to me and saying: ‘We played it at our wedding.’ If I hand the mic over, they can sing the entire thing themselves.”
As Leskanich points out, “Walking On Sunshine” has appeared in a truly staggering number of movies and TV shows, and has even become something of a theme song for the Tampa Bay Rays. The song has appeared in everything from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia to Young Sheldon, from High Fidelity to Ella Enchanted. The track also got another boost in popularity in 2009 when it was featured in an episode of Glee, where it was performed in a mashup with Beyoncé’s “Halo” and ended up making it into the U.S. top 40 yet again.
