For nine of the last 10 weeks, Alex Warren's "Ordinary" has sat at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart. But this week, it's been dethroned by an act that isn't even real: HUNTR/X, the girl group from the movie KPop Demon Hunters. On the albums chart, Reneé Rapp, $uicideBoy$ and Yeat all crash the top 10. And, with a new Taylor Swift album set to drop soon, we survey how the singer's albums are currently stacking up on the pop charts.
TOP ALBUMS
The Billboard 200 albums chart has experienced rapid turnover in the past few weeks, even as two top titles remain more or less immovable: Morgan Wallen's I'm the Problem, which holds at No. 1 for a 10th nonconsecutive week, and the soundtrack to KPop Demon Hunters, which remains at No. 2. The latter is still gaining on the former — and will likely surpass it, for at least a week or two, once physical copies begin rolling out next month.
From No. 3 on down, though, the top 10 has been unusually volatile. Three albums debut in the top 10 and six drop out, which tells you that some albums aren't "surging" so much as "filling a vacuum left when the bottom falls out of other titles' streaming and sales numbers."
First, let's go over the good news, in the form of those three debuts: Reneé Rapp's BITE ME enters the chart at No. 3 — that's a career high by a substantial margin, given that the singer/actress's only other album to hit the Billboard 200 was 2023's Snow Angel, which peaked at No. 44. Rapp isn't likely to hang out in the top 10 for long (BITE ME's numbers are mostly derived from first-week sales, which creates only a short-term sugar high where the charts are concerned), but No. 3 is No. 3. Then, you've got two rap acts who've landed in the top 10 before: $uicideBoy$, whose Thy Kingdom Come debuts at No. 4, and Yeat, whose Dangerous Summer enters the chart at No. 9.
The bad news: Not only did all three of last week's debuts (new albums by Tomorrow X Together, YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Tyler Childers) vacate the top 10, but we also lost two recent records by hip-hop powerhouses. JACKBOYS & Travis Scott's JACKBOYS 2 never seemed destined to hang around in the chart's upper reaches for months on end, but Tyler, The Creator's Don't Tap the Glass only scored two weeks in the top 10 — the first at No. 1 — before sliding from No. 4 to No. 11 in week 3. That's a speedy decline for an artist whose last album, CHROMAKOPIA, spent its first three weeks on the chart at No. 1 back in November. (The sixth title to drop out of the top 10: The Essential Ozzy Osbourne, which had leapt up the charts in the aftermath of the heavy-metal icon's death.)
TOP SONGS
For nine of the last 10 weeks, Alex Warren's "Ordinary" had the Hot 100's No. 1 song locked down, with no particular end in sight; after all, it's ruled the airplay charts for ages, and once a song has become an airplay juggernaut, it can become extremely difficult to dislodge from the chart's upper reaches. Overtaking "Ordinary" would seem especially challenging for a track like HUNTR/X's "Golden," which has ridden the KPop Demon Hunters boom to No. 2 thanks to blockbuster streaming numbers, but hasn't shown nearly as much strength with commercial radio programmers.
But this week,"Golden" does take the No. 1 spot, in the process effectuating a true milestone: The members of HUNTR/X — the fictional K-pop group made up of nonfictional singers EJAE, Audrey Nuna and REI AMI — have just become the first women K-pop artists ever to hit No. 1. (If you're wondering about "APT.," last year's duet between BLACKPINK's Rosé and Bruno Mars, it peaked at No. 3.)
K-pop acts routinely top the Billboard 200 albums chart, and eight K-pop songs hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 prior to "Golden" — all of them connected to the boy band BTS. Now, a K-pop girl group has finally topped the Hot 100 in the U.S. And, as "Golden" begins to make headway with radio programmers — its airplay numbers are up more than 70% this week, though "Golden" still lags far behind "Ordinary" on that front — it may be tough to beat in the coming weeks.
The other major news on the Hot 100 involves the career-best debut of Chappell Roan's new single "The Subway." Roan has been building anticipation for the song's release ever since she premiered it at a Governors Ball concert last year. Now, the finished single enters the Hot 100 at No. 3 — besting the peaks of Roan's other top 10 singles ("Pink Pony Club," "The Giver" and "Good Luck, Babe!").
WORTH NOTING
Early Tuesday morning, Taylor Swift announced the imminent release of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl. Specifics are still forthcoming as of press time — Swift's website reveals that physical copies will ship before Oct. 13, but that doesn't preclude an earlier digital release — so it seems like as good a time as any to survey Swift's current place in the chart landscape.
This week's charts document a stretch without any major Swift news to boost the numbers: no fresh news about her acquiring her masters, no Eras Tour clips crashing people's social-media feeds, no rumors tied to announcements that might be forthcoming at awards shows, no dull boomlets of controversy in which the president of the United States has deemed her "NO LONGER HOT." So we've got a decent snapshot of the status quo between promotional cycles.
And… it looks pretty good for Taylor Swift. With nothing to promote at that moment and no major news lingering in fans' minds, Swift has eight albums on the current Billboard 200 albums chart: Folklore (No. 24), The Tortured Poets Department (No. 27), Lover (No. 51), Reputation (No. 62), Midnights (No. 81), the Taylor's Version edition of 1989 (No. 136), the Taylor's Version edition of Red (No. 179) and the non-Taylor's Version edition of 1989 (No. 180). It's unusual to see Folklore charting higher than TTPD — the former recently celebrated its five-year anniversary, which may have given it a boost — but that otherwise represents a solid baseline for those albums' popularity in the present day.
What remains to be seen, at least between now and the release of The Life of a Showgirl, is whether the anticipation of new Taylor Swift music boosts the chart performance of the albums that aren't currently on the chart: her self-titled debut, Speak Now, Fearless, Evermore, the non-Taylor's Version edition of Red and so on. But, one way or another, we're in for another season of Swift — in the news, during the looming NFL season and, as a matter of absolute certainty, on the charts.
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