I Hate U I Love U

I Hate U I Love U — gnash Featuring Olivia O'Brien

"I Hate U I Love U" is one of the defining crossover moments of the mid-2010s internet-to-radio pipeline. The track was released by gnash, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter born Garrett Charles Nash, in 2016 through RCA Records. It features then-sixteen-year-old vocalist Olivia O'Brien, who had connected with Nash via SoundCloud before either artist had major mainstream exposure. The song was written by Nash alongside Olivia O'Brien and produced by gnash himself, reflecting the bedroom-pop, self-produced ethos that defined a generation of streaming-era breakouts.

The track began its life as a SoundCloud upload and quickly accumulated millions of plays through organic sharing before formal label infrastructure got involved. That grassroots trajectory became central to its identity: listeners felt they had discovered the song rather than been served it, which deepened the emotional investment people brought to its lyrics about longing and resentment after a romantic loss. RCA recognized the momentum and formally released it as a single in the summer of 2016, pushing it into mainstream radio rotation and digital distribution on a wider scale.

On the Billboard Hot 100, "I Hate U I Love U" climbed to a peak position of number 10, making it a genuine top-ten hit in the United States. The chart run was notable for its longevity: the song spent many weeks in the upper reaches of the chart, benefiting from consistent streaming numbers alongside radio airplay. It also charted on the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks chart and performed strongly in multiple international markets, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, where it reached the top twenty.

The music video, directed with a lo-fi, intimate aesthetic, leaned into the authentic, low-key visual style that had made the song feel personal on streaming platforms. Both gnash and Olivia O'Brien appeared in the video in a manner that reinforced the conversational, almost diary-like quality of the song's structure. The video accumulated hundreds of millions of views on YouTube, further amplifying the song's commercial reach beyond its radio success.

The production itself is sparse and deliberate. A gently picked guitar figure underpins Nash's understated verses, while O'Brien's chorus provides a sharper, more emotionally direct counterpoint. The interplay between the two voices, each representing a different stage of emotional processing after a breakup, gave the song a structural and thematic richness that set it apart from more formulaic pop fare of the same period.

For Olivia O'Brien, the collaboration served as a springboard. Though she had been producing her own music independently, the exposure from "I Hate U I Love U" connected her to a vastly larger audience and led directly to her own solo recording career. She later signed with Island Records and continued releasing music that drew on the same confessional, emotionally raw aesthetic she demonstrated on this track. The song effectively launched two careers simultaneously, which is a relatively rare outcome for a featured-artist collaboration.

Critically, the song was received warmly by outlets covering streaming-era pop. Reviewers noted that it captured a particular kind of millennial and Generation Z emotional vocabulary: the ambivalence of still caring deeply about someone you know is wrong for you. That tension, expressed without melodrama in the production and delivery, resonated especially with younger audiences who encountered the song during formative emotional periods.

The track appeared on gnash's debut extended play and later on his album projects as a centerpiece of his catalog. Its success also demonstrated the commercial viability of the SoundCloud-to-mainstream pipeline at a moment when the music industry was actively debating how to monetize and promote music that first found its audience on non-commercial streaming platforms. "I Hate U I Love U" became something of a case study in that conversation, cited alongside contemporaries like Post Malone's early work as evidence that organic, bedroom-produced tracks could compete with major-label machinery without abandoning their original character.

In terms of cultural footprint, the song has maintained a durable streaming presence well beyond its initial chart run. It became a staple of breakup playlists and curated emotional collections on Spotify and Apple Music, which sustained its play counts and kept it in the cultural conversation years after its release. The Billboard Hot 100 peak of number 10 remains a milestone that gnash has not surpassed in the years since, making "I Hate U I Love U" the defining commercial achievement of his career as of the mid-2020s. It stands as a testament to the power of emotional authenticity and platform-native promotion in reshaping how pop music reaches and retains audiences.