Adele has smashed the record for the most-streamed song in a week in the UK, earning 24m streams for her new single Easy on Me – over seven million more than the previous record-holder.

The song – a poignant and tearjerking ballad about a breakup, in the time-honoured Adele style, becomes her third UK No 1 single after Someone Like You in 2011 and Hello in 2015.

The previous high for a week of streams was 7 Rings by Ariana Grande, which was listened to 16.9m times on its release in January 2019.

Factoring in downloads of the song and combining them with the number of streams to arrive at an overall “chart sales” figure of 217,300, Easy on Me earns the highest first-week sales of any song since Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You in January 2017, which earned 226,800. Globally, its video has been viewed nearly 100m times on YouTube.

Easy on Me is taken from Adele’s forthcoming album 30, released on 19 November, written amid her divorce from husband Simon Konecki, with whom she has a nine-year-old son, Angelo.

Speaking to US Vogue about the album earlier this month, she discussed the relationship strife that has long informed her work. “I realised that I was the problem. Cause all the other albums are like, ‘You did this! You did that!’ … Then I was like: ‘Oh, shit, I’m the running theme, actually. Maybe it’s me!’”

The intense anticipation has prompted listeners to reacquaint themselves with her previous albums, causing them to jump up the album chart: 25 is at No 3 this week, 21 is at No 6, and 19 is at No 15.

Coldplay top the album chart with the newly-released Music of the Spheres, meaning that all nine of their albums have reached No 1 in the UK. The band are also at No 5 in the singles chart with BTS collaboration My Universe. With 101,000 chart sales, Music of the Spheres is the year’s fastest-selling album, and the first to top 100,000 sales in its first week since Ed Sheeran’s No 6 Collaborations Project in July 2019.

The Beatles are at No 2 in the album chart with their “super deluxe” reissue of Let It Be, released ahead of a three-part Peter Jackson documentary about the making of the album, Get Back, which debuts on Disney+ on 25 November.

At No 4 is Daniel O’Donnell with his new album 60, which extends a remarkable chart record: the Irish singer has had an album in the UK charts every year for the last 33 years, the only artist to have achieved that feat.