Fated
After the storm, something approaching calm, perhaps too calm engulfs us this week. The present reigning Queen of Pop Taylor Swift maintains her commanding lead over the opposition, in both singles and albums markets. The Life Of A Showgirl is duly the No.1 album for the second week running making it enjoyably only the second album this year to enjoy two consecutive weeks at the top of the charts. Sabrina Carpenter's Man's Best Friend is the other.
Meanwhile The Fate Of Ophelia enjoys a second straight week at the top of the Official UK Singles chart, perhaps obviously not managing the numbers it posted last week, but still ending up with a massive sale of over 90,000 units. That's more than 30,000 ahead of its nearest rival, Man I Need by Olivia Dean which springs back to what you might regard as its default position, the No.2 rank it has occupied for six of its nine weeks on release so far.
This resetting of matters is all down to Taylor Swift's two other singles Opalite and Elizabeth Taylor which ease off the throttle a little, although they are still both Top 10 hits as they rest at 4 and 6 respectively. That has left room for Golden to move back to No.3, and this is where it gets really fun. Because the former No.1 from Huntr/X actually increases its chart sales once more after two weeks of decline, and for those keeping track resets its ACR clock for a second time.
Now let's be honest, while Taylor Swift is in the neighbourhood there is practically zero chance of Golden returning to No.1 any time soon, especially as Man I Need is also still bettering it for chart units. But it remains startling that the Top 3 singles are all currently doing numbers which would mean a probable No.1 placing in most weeks of the past few years - and that genuinely hasn't been the way the singles market has behaved for some time.
Fit Check For My Napalm Era
One KPop Demon Hunters track that has fallen to ACR however is the Saja Boys' Soda Pop. That means it vanishes from view, clearing the way for Huntr/X's How It's Done to wink back into life. Those with long memories will recall that it was one of the initial batch of hit singles from the movie, rising as far as No.29 in July before being ousted. It returns to chart eligibility this week at a brand new peak of No.12. With the other Saja Boys track Your Idol also set to fall to ACR next week, the demons appear to have been fully vanquished, and we should see a third Huntr/X track (hopefully This Is What It Sounds Like) make a long overdue chart bow next week.
Spiro-Graphic
Sounding for all the world like Adele and Amy Winehouse blended together, 20-year-old singer-songwriter Sienna Spiro from London is the latest hot new prospect to benefit from some viral promotion, helping her move from online sensation to proper chart star. This week she achieves the remarkable feat of charting with three new entries simultaneously without needing to release an album. Brand new epic ballad Die On This Hill is the biggest of these, taking her into the Top 40 for the first time ever at No.26. This single is, in a word, mesmerising. Her crystal clear vocals cut through a production which features little more than a piano and a slow building orchestral backing, carefully pitched to give this a quite epic feel. If these were ordinary times and the charts behaved properly then you would be nominating this as a contender to be Christmas No.1. As we all know it stands zero chance of that, but to continually bang a drum, something that charts round about now is a song that is in prime position to emerge at the head of the pile when the January reset arrives. And if Die On This Hill can maintain that momentum, you'd love to think it will be part of that story.
At this rate I'm going to end up nominating every new entry from now until the end of November as a "potential January No.1" in the hope that one of them is right.
The other two Sienna Spiro tracks are all older releases. You Stole The Show first appeared back in July to little fanfare but is now this week's No.65. And Maybe gave her a chart debut when it spent a solitary week at No.75 back in November last year. This week it is back at a slightly new peak of No.72.
Culture Clash
I'm still unsure whether the tactic of having all the Blackpink girls maintain solo careers alongside their work with the group is genius or an unwanted distraction. But still they come. Two and a half years after she made her Top 40 debut with No.38 hit Flower, Kim "Jisoo" Ji-Soo returns to the UK chart with a song that promised much midweek but frustratingly can only enter one rung higher at No.37. But this track is an intriguing one, continuing the trend for teaming K-pop singers with big western stars for full crossover potential, Eyes Closed is a collaboration with no less a figure than former One Directioner Zayn Malik. Amusingly both artists are generally billed in capitals so the single is credited to JISOO & ZAYN as if to hammer us with the concept. Eyes Closed marks Zayn's own chart return, his first Top 40 single since Love Like This made No.36 in August 2023.
The song itself is a beautifully compelling pop record, nothing with Zayn's voice on it is ever anything other than a satisfying listen and the lyrics hit just as hard as most of his songs do. The only fear is that, like so many such singles, its appeal is entirely fan-led, a one week wonder that pops a number as everyone (BLINKs and Zquad) piles in to appreciate it before they move on. I'd love to be wrong here, but you know that I'm not.
Going… Going…
Still, at least Eyes Closed made the Top 40, which is more than can be said for the rest of the week's new releases. PinkPantheress' new remix of her Fancy That mixtape (entitled Fancy Some More) seemed to get the whole of my Twitter timeline buzzing but it only manages to propel Stateside back to No.45 (it made No.66 when the MT first came out back in May.
But I'm most interested this week by a single which lands far outside the normal scope of this column. New at No.82 is the new David Guetta offering Gone Gone Gone. A Mark Ronson-esque single featuring the intriguing vocal combination of Teddy Swims and Tones & I, the latter demonstrating that the mewing of her famous hit Dance Monkey actually concealed a quite extraordinary set of pipes. I'd hate to see this one fall by the wayside, because it too is phenomenally worthwhile, even if the video makes no bones about the fact the pair were never actually in the studio together. Because who actually is these days?
