Charts – 19 June 2026
Well, someone still cares about being number one.
1. Taylor Swift – “I Knew It, I Knew You”
Two weeks, but that turns out to be because they held back over 40,000 CD copies to ship in week two. That accounts for more than half of its chart point this week; on streaming alone, it would have been number 7. That means we can be fairly sure that it won’t be number 1 next week. But hey, at least she has the satisfaction of stopping…
2. Olivia Rodrigo – “Stupid Song”
This is the release week single from her third album “You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love”, which enters the album chart as her third number 1. She also has “The Cure” at number 3 and “Drop Dead” at number 5, so this is still very much her week. The album has enough points to beat the rest of the top 10 combined, and while a majority of that comes from first-week physical sales, she would have been number 1 by a wide margin on streaming alone.
The other track in the top five is “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender & Olivia Dean, which celebrates a complete uninterrupted year in the top 40. And, god help us, its streams went slightly up this week, so yet again it avoids going onto downweighting. Alarmingly, the Sunday midweeks have it returning to number 1 – but that’s helped by a release of seven inch singles which will all have been credited at the start of the week, so we’ll see whether that’s sustained.
22. Le Sserafim, Illit & Katseye – “Iconic By Mistake”
This is a collaboration of three K-pop bands, or rather, two actual K-pop bands plus the K-pop modelled international outfit Katseye. Presumably Katseye’s recent UK chart success accounts for this being here, because Le Sserafim and Illit have never come close to having hits in the UK – making this one of those odd “standing up to the haters” tracks where you kind of have to take their word for it. Whether it really benefits from having three groups on it is debatable – it makes them seem interchangeable more than iconic – but the track itself is weirdly growing on me, and at least it stands out in a chart where Alex Warren songs can hang around for a year. Oh, and if you’re wondering why Le Sserafim is spelt like that, it’s so that it can be an anagram of “I’m Fearless”, apparently.
This is a re-entry prompted by his current tour; the track had a week at number 1 in February. “American Girls” also climbs back from 18 to 12, and his back catalogue track “Sign of the Times” climbs from 29-28. The album “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally” rebounds from 12 to 3. Curiously, a third single was released from the album – “Dance No More” – but it couldn’t get past number 55 (and is disqualified from this week’s chart under the three song rule).
28. Shakira & Burna Boy – “Dai Dai”
This year’s World Cup promotional single. It’s nothing to write home about, but it does extend Shakira’s chart record – she last had a hit single in 2023 when she got to number 31 with an untitled track released as “Bzrp Music Sessions – Volume 53”. Before that, her previous hit had been in 2014. In fairness, that’s because she’s been focussing on Spanish language markets where she continues to have hits.
35. David Baddiel, Frank Skinner & The Lightning Seeds – “Three Lions”
We’re doing this again? Okay, apparently we’re doing this again. Three Lions was written for the Euro 96 tournament and spent two weeks at number 1 that year. It had another week at number 1 in 2018, and a rewritten version spent three weeks at number 1 in 1998 for the World Cup. It is, to be fair, the gold standard of football songs, being a both a viable terrace chant for England fans and a proper song about the experience of fandom that has a broader appeal.
37. Shakira featuring Freshlyground – “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”
Uh… okay. This is a track recorded for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and it got to number 21 at the time. It hasn’t been back since, probably because it doesn’t make any sense at all outside the context of an African World Cup… but I guess maybe the Shakira track for 2026 has reminded people of the time she made a better one?
This week’s climbers:
- “On 2Nite” by Silva Bumpa climbs 32-30. And… oh, that’s it – everything else is just rebounding.
There are six new entries, plus a re-entry at number 39 for Olivia Dean’s “So Easy (To Fall In Love)”. The seven tracks leaving the top 40 are:
- “Fever Dream” by Alex Warren, after a 15 week run that peaked at 3.
- “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson, with a five week run that entered at 5 and drifted down from there.
- “Noble” by F3miii, which entered at 34 two weeks ago
- “Hit the Wall” by Gracie Abrams, which entered at 18 and only lasted four weeks.
- “National Treasures” by Drake, which entered at number 3 four weeks ago.
- “Passenger” by Alex Warren, after a single week at number 22. That’s weird – Alex Warren isn’t normally a first-week fanbase act.
- “Bloodstream” by Alyssa Grace, also after a single week, this time at number 25.
On the album chart:
1. Olivia Rodrigo – “You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love”
See above.
5. Embrace – “Avalanche”
Three of the last four Embrace studio albums have landed at number 5. (The other one was a number 9.) And no, that’s not a cover above.
19. Angine de Poitrine – “Vol II”
23. Angine de Poitrine – “Vol I”
Experimental Quebecois indie which has gone somewhat viral on YouTube. These are physical releases of their first two albums.
20. Sonny Fodera – “Can We Do It All Again”
Finally for this week, his sixth studio album, but the first to chart. It includes a bunch of tracks that have already been hit singles over the last few years – “Asking” (number 7 in 2023), “Somedays” (number 5 in 2024), “Tell me” (number 23 in 2025) and “Think About Us” (number 18 in 2025).
No song can be the “gold standard of football songs” if it doesn’t have a John Barnes rap break.
I listened to a few of those World Cup songs. My ears nearly started bleeding. Maybe I just listened to the wrong ones.
There’s something out there that has the vibe of a World Cup song but isn’t. That being PNAU and The Warning – Tu Corazon (Your Heart). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7JcN5lnLew
And I got thinking. Must be weird for The Warning. Not only are other people writing a song about how cool you are, they get you to perform on the track!
Why are they asking a Colombian salsa dancer to write a song celebrating Africa?
Reading the Wikipedia article about Waka Waka.
This is like a premonition of how some kind of desperate fandom latches onto every throwaway piece of pop culture bullshit these days.
Olivia Rodrigo was on Twitter the other day saying that at her live shows the fans wear nappies so that they can stay at the front of the crowd, and while performing she can smell them. She must be glad she doesn’t have to make videos in a miasma of piss.
Maybe I didn’t appreciate how artificial a number 1 can be in it streaming age by up weighting and targeting physical sales in a certain week? Does Taylor Swift and her management do this per country? It’s a pretty slick and well resourced operation if so!
It’s not typical to hold back physical copies in order to extend your time at number one, but it does happen – you ship them in week one if you need them to get over the line and otherwise you hold them back until you need them. Lewis Capaldi has done this too.
@Evilgus – Yes, absolutely management and artists themselves will work to goose chart placement with various stunts. This is the first time I’ve heard of them holding physical copies until a second week, but certain things like re-releasing a song but this time with a featured artist, or re-releasing an album but this time with an extra track, are super common ways to try and create or maintain chart milestones. Closest example I can think of is how some artists surprise release their albums digitally about a week before physical copies hit stores, so they get a hit of huge streaming numbers in week one and then when streams start going down they get a hit of physical sales in week two that keeps chart placement up.
It’s handled differently in different countries (the US has no three-song per album rule, for instance), but that’s the exact reason why there are specific rules about what counts and what doesn’t. Taylor Swift’s operation is indeed particularly “slick and well resourced” about this as you say, for instance each album release often gets different covers and/or variants with an extra song or two, ensuring many fans buy more than one copy and increasing sales.
Music charts have taken on a bit of cultural meaning as fans look to them for cues about how our favorite artists are doing, what’s the landscape of music in 2026, etc. But the charts started as an industry tool for labels to better understand what is making them money, and morphed into a promotional tool to help them make more money. So it’s not really artificial when a number one gets by on those terms – it’s just counter to our fan-based expectation of it representing some sort of democratic truth about pop music.
I’d have thought the gold standard of World Cup songs was World in Motion by New Order or for some of you, Ally’s Tartan Army.
The Shikara Waka Waka song also has controversey, due to the charity portion of the so g’s sales not apparently going to where they should and Shia,r, FiFa and others pocketing a lot of cash.
Every time England win two or three games in an international tournament the country goes into a kind of fugue state where everyone believes we can win just the next game and the one after that and it’ll be our year. And “Three Lions” goes up the charts.
I like New Order but that song is garbage.
Between World in Motion, Waka Waka, and Dai Dai I’m sensing a pattern of artists phoning it in with the blandest entries to their oeuvre.
I’m just hoping the Tartan Army comes back to Boston and brings the party with them.
Bring back Vindaloo