The rest of the top 10 is starting to free up – mostly due to older records being cleared out under the downweighting rules – but there’s no shifting…

1.  Miley Cyrus – “Flowers”

…just yet. It is comfortably past its peak, so the end is in sight, but in the meantime it gets a sixth week at number one. This matches the run of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” in November/December, but it’s not especially out of the ordinary yet – 2022 saw three other number 1s with longer runs than this (“We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, “As It Was” and “Afraid To Feel”).

There is movement in the top 10, but none of it involves new entries, so we move on to…

18. Niall Horan – “Heaven”

This is the lead single from his third album. By the standards of One Direction members who aren’t Harry Styles, Niall Horan’s solo career is entirely respectable. It’s been three years since his previous album, and so it’s been a while since we’ve had him on the singles chart (he also popped up on an Anne-Marie single in 2021).

Horan can lay claim to two top 10 singles and two top 3 albums, which is not bad at all. By comparison:

• Liam Payne only released one album, in 2019 – it did produce two top 10 singles, but it only got to number 17.
• Louis Tomlinson hasn’t had a hit single since 2016 – though he did release a number 1 album last year.
• Zayn Malik got off to a strong start as the first to go solo, but the hits tailed off after earl 2018. His second album, “Icarus Falls”, missed the album top 40 entirely, though its follow-up “Nobody is Listening” – and dear god, what do those titles say about his state of mind? – reached 17.

So Payne is doing fine – his albums sell, and he can still get his singles into the chart. “Heaven” is… not bad at all, in fact. It’s a solid enough single that might find a niche in the retro thing that seems to be one of the minor chart trends this year.

23. Mae Stephens – “If We Ever Broke Up”

Chart debut. This is the other sort of hit spawned from TikTok – a teenager who built an audience of her own over there. It’s not bad, though I’d have thought twice about embedding TikToks in the lyric video.

36. Ayra Starr – “Rush”

Another chart debut. And more Nigerian pop – like K-pop, this is no longer an occasional visitor to the UK singles chart but a regular presence. In fact, Nigerian hits tend to be more organic than the K-pop ones, which are still heavily based on first-week fan audiences. Starr is being promoted to the UK market, but this isn’t her current single – it’s one from four months ago that’s belatedly taken off on TikTok. Once again, TikTok is right – this is great. True, large chunks of the lyrics won’t mean a thing to UK audiences, but enough of the chorus does, and that’s all you need.

37. The Weeknd – “Die For You”

Speaking of TikTok… this is a track from the Weeknd’s 2016 album “Starboy” which got reactivated by TikTok last year and became a hit in the US. That’s one of the reasons why it has a video – the other was supposedly to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the album’s release. It’s now being seriously promoted as a single, and a remix with Ariana Grande is due out, so it’s likely to climb.

38. Beabadoobee – “Glue Song”

Another track for the vaguely retro category (cutesy division). Technically this is Beabadoobee’s second hit, as she’s credited as the featured artist on Powfu’s “Death Bed (Coffee For Your Head)” (number 4 in 2020). But that’s because a sped-up sample of her song “Coffee” plays through the whole song. This is the first time she’s charted with one of her songs in the form she wrote it.

This week’s climbers:

• “Boy’s a Liar” by PinkPantheress climbs 3-2.
• “Kill Bill” by SZA climbs 4-3, matching her guest appearance on Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More” as her biggest hit.
• “Calm Down” by Rema climbs to 5, after spending 7 weeks hovering between 6 and 8.
• “Players” by Coi Leray climbs 12-7.
• “10:35” by Tiesto & Tate McRae climbs 11-8. And there was me thinking this track had bombed when it entered at 39 in November and vanished. It’s Tiesto’s fifth top 10 hit, and McRae’s second.
• “Ceilings” by Lizzy McAlpine climbs 21-9. As I said when it charted a couple of weeks ago, this is a track which has been out for months and has taken off over the last few weeks. Very sensibly, a proper video has now appeared.
• “Us Against the World” by Strandz climbs 27-12.
• “People” by Libianca climbs 15-13.
• “Trustfall” by Pink climbs 35-14, and “Never Gonna Not Dance Again” climbs 40-19. This ties in with the release of the album this week, so more on that below.
• “Red Flags” by Mimi Webb climbs 17-15.
• “I’ll Be Waiting” by Cian Ducrot climbs 19-16. That overtakes his previous (and only other) hit “All For You”.
• “Lavender Haze” by Taylor Swift climbs 30-22.
• “Ready to Fly” by Sub Focus & Dimension climbs 34-29.

There are five new entries this week, plus a couple of re-entries from records hovering around the 40 mark. The seven tracks making way for them:

• “Cuff It” by Beyoncé, which has been hovering in and out of the top 40 since the new year.
• “Lost” by Linkin Park, which got a week at 18; it was always likely to be a fanbase record.
• “Pointless” by Lewis Capaldi, a former number 1.
• “Me & You” by Central Cee, after a single week at 31. That’s a bit surprising.
• “Golden Hour” by JVKE, which peaked at 19 and managed 9 weeks in the top 40 in total – it would have been longer if it hadn’t been shunted aside during Christmas.
• “Psycho” by Anne-Marie & Aitch, which peaked at 5.
• “Call Me What You Like” by Lovejoy, after a week at number 32.

On the album chart, all this week’s new entries are in the top 10:

1. Pink – “Trustfall”

This has actually produced two hit singles, which is pretty impressive for someone whose first hit “There You Go” was in 2000. It’s her fourth number 1 album – her previous two studio albums also made number 1, as did 2008’s “Funhouse”. But all her studio albums since 2002 have made the top 5.

2. Inhaler – “Cuts & Bruises”

The follow-up to 2021’s number 1 debut “It Won’t Always Be Like This”. They were a bit unlucky to go up against Pink, really.

3. Those Damn Crows – “Inhale/Exhale”

Their third album. The first didn’t chart, the second made number 14.

6. Orbital – “Optical Delusion”

A little surprisingly, this is the highest placing Orbital album since 1999’s “The Middle of Nowhere” – in fact, they haven’t made the top 10 since then. There are some oddities on this one – a collaboration with Sleaford Mods, and the above track with the Mediaeval Baebes singing “Ring a Ring a Roses” in some sort of Covid thing. (No, I didn’t know the Mediaeval Baebes were still going either.)