Oh god…

1. Alex Warren – “Ordinary” 

Twelve weeks. The chart company is getting very excitable about how this compares to American artists of the past, but it’s not very meaningful, because they were working in the sales era, and so their runs at number one weren’t measuring continued listening.

At this point we need to get into the tedious details of the downweighting rule. I normally summarise it here as meaning that a record gets downweighted if it’s been out for ten weeks and it’s more than three weeks past its peak. It’s a bit subtler than that: it’s three weeks in which the change in consumption from week-to-week is consistently below the market average. Alex Warren has benefitted from this, because he has had three consecutive weeks where consumption went down, but in some of them the whole market was down, so he was still above average. The result is that he is still not in any imminent danger of being downweighted.

If he makes a thirteenth week – and by all appearances he will because he still has nearly double the consumption of the number 2 single – then that will match the run of “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran in 2017, which is before the downweighting rule was introduced, and so isn’t directly comparable. God help us all.

6. Tate McRae – “Just Keep Watching”

This is from the soundtrack of the F1 movie. The track itself is actually alright, but it comes with one of her signature Incredibly Subtle Videos. It’s her third top 10 hit this year, and her album “So Close to What” is stil in the top 10 after 15 weeks on release (it  got as low as 22 before rebounding), so she does seem to be established now as a major name. She has two other tracks on the top 40: “Revolving Door” at 20, and “What I Want” with Morgan Wallen at 35.

27. Addison Rae – “Fame is a Gun”

On the one hand, this is Addison Rae showing a bit of range by moving beyond the Lana Del Rey dream pop stuff. On the other hand, it’s very Charli XCX. Still, there’s got to be room for School of Charli XCX, right? It’s her third top 40 hit – its predecessor “Headphones On” entered at around this level and was gone after two weeks, so we’ll see if this does any better.

28. Olivia Dean – “Nice to Each Other”

She’ll be happy about this. Olivia Dean has had two previous top 40 hits, but one was a Christmas record for Amazon in 2021, and the other was “It Isn’t Perfect But It Might Be” from the soundtrack of the last Bridget Jones film, which only got to 36. Her first album reached number 4 in 2023 but dropped straight out of the top 75 in its second week. But this… this is an actual regular single promoting her next album. It’s sunny! I quite like it!

37. Levi Heron – “The Glen”

 

This oddity has been out for two months and started climbing up the lower reaches over the last two weeks, which means it has some actual momentum and every chance of going further. (If you choose to look beyond the top 40, this is a climber from number 47.) You don’t get much more “viral hit” than this: a previously unknown DJ from the Isle of Lewis with a day job on a fishing boat doing a happy hardcore remix of a five-year-old folk single called “The Glen” for his mum’s 50th birthday party, and sticking it on Soundcloud because what the hell. Track goes viral, sample gets cleared, official release. How the hell Heron wound up getting sole artist credit for that release is a bit of a mystery, because even his own YouTube video only credits him as a remixer.

The original is by Beluga Lagoon, a folk rock project of wildlife filmmaker Andrew O’Donnell. I’ve never heard of them, to be honest, but they drew pretty well in Glasgow last year, and they’re playing the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh at Christmas, so they clearly have some profile in the Scottish live circuit, even if most of their gigs seem to be in small towns. Since O’Donnell is a filmmaker, the original track has an actual microbudget video. The song is extremely Caledonian, but I can’t help wondering if it has genuine crossover potential now that someone’s drawn attention to the fact that it exists.

This week’s climbers:

• “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae climbs 3-2.
• “Family Matters” by Skye Newman climbs 6-5.
• “Back to Friends” by Sombr climbs 11-9, giving him two top ten hits (“Undressed” is a non-mover at 4)
• “Shake it to the Max (Fly)” by Moliy & Silent Addy climbs 13-12.
• “Can’t Decide” by Max Dean, Locky & Luke Dean climbs 19-13.
• “Hairdresser” by Skye Newman climbs 16-15.
• “One Thing” by Lola Young climbs 22-19.

The four tracks leaving the top 40:

• “That’s So True” by Gracie Abrams, which re-entered at 38 last week.
• “Die with a Smile” by Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars, which re-entered at 37 last week.
• “Good Luck Babe” by Chappell Roan, which re-entered at 39 last week. Seeing a pattern?
• “Timeless” by The Weeknd & Playboi Carti, which re-entered at 30 three weeks ago.

On the album chart:

1. Ed Sheeran – “+ – = ÷ x Tour Collection”

This has been out for 36 weeks and it’s pretty much just number 1 by default. It had another single week at number 1 in January. Rather anticlimactically, it gives Sheeran his 50th week at number 1 on the album chart.

3. Miley Cyrus – “Something Beautiful”

Includes the single “End of the World”, which reached number 23. It’s officially classed as her ninth studio album, though that involves ignoring the records she released as Hannah Montana. Her previous album reached number 1 so reaching number 3 in a quiet week is a bit disappointing – but hey, her 2019 album got to 18.

7. Taylor Swift – “Reputation”

This is an unusual one: “Reputation” re-enters because Taylor Swift has regained the rights to it and given her fans her blessing to listen to it again. It gets more attention than the other albums in this position because it didn’t exist in a “Taylor’s Version” edition. The original version of “1989” also re-enters at number 39.

24. Garbage – “Let All That We Imagine Be the Light”

Yikes, that’s low. The last Garbage album was “No Gods No Masters” in 2021, and that got to number 5.

27. Matt Berninger – “Get Sunk”

Second solo album by the lead singer of the National. The previous one got to number 21 in 2020. This is also about where National side projects tend to wind up.