TikTok virality gives Jeff Buckley his first US Top 100 win 29 years after his death | Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley has achieved his first No. 1 single on the US Hot 100, 29 years after his death, with “Lover, You Should Come Over” at No. 97 this week.

The popularity of TikTok is behind this success, as a new generation of listeners have discovered Buckley’s soulful, romantic songwriting and paired it with videos on the social media platform. TikTok videos don’t count among U.S. chart positions, but widespread trends are pushing listeners toward songs on streaming services that matter.

Lover, You Should Have Come is an acoustic song in which Buckley laments a broken relationship and longs for the lover of the title to return and forgive him. “All my blood is for the sweetness of her laugh… She is the tear that hangs within my soul forever,” says one particularly heartfelt passage.

The track appears on Grace, Buckley’s only studio album, released in 1994. The album only reached No. 82 in the US but was a touchstone for college students and hopeless romantics, eventually becoming a platinum seller.

Sadly, Buckley never followed up on the matter. He died in 1997, accidentally drowning while swimming in the Mississippi River. Sketches of songs he was working on for a second album were released the following year as a collection of sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. In 2016, another compilation of unheard material was released: You and Me, which mainly contains cover versions he recorded in 1993, including songs by Bob Dylan, The Smiths and Led Zeppelin.

Buckley isn’t the only ’90s alternative name to get a chart hit of late thanks to TikTok: Radiohead’s song Let Down, from 1997’s OK Computer, charted for the first time in 2025.

In December, TikTok’s Year in Music report claimed that eight out of the 10 US singles of 2025 “had a viral moment on TikTok first”, and that all 13 UK singles of the year went viral on the platform at some point.