Week Ending August 8th 2024

Prove I'm Right

So you want to replace Sabrina Carpenter at the top of the Official UK Singles chart? Well good luck babe, because right now there's still no shifting her. In a week where just 3,500 sales separated the Top 3 single Please Please Please still clings on doggedly to pole position, this now its second week in a row at No.1 and fifth in total. Now 8 weeks old the single has spent every one of these as a Top 3 single - but be warned, its ACR clock has now ticked twice. A further fall in sales probably means it won't be No.1 next week, but it also means it is set to drop down regardless. Extraordinarily Sabrina's similarly long-running hit Espresso this week actually goes back up the chart on its second week on ACR. Officially No.8, if its streams hadn't been halved in value it would have posted 50,000 sales and just edged Please Please Please out to still be be No.1.

For the moment all we can do is continue to update the stats from last week. Sabrina Carpenter has now spent 12 weeks at the top of the charts - still a little way short of the 18 Ed Sheeran managed in 2021. International acts have now been top of the British charts for 31 weeks in a row to equal the run posted between July 1957 and February 1958.

As I cheekily hinted, the biggest rival to Sabrina's crown came from Chappell Roan as Good Luck Babe continues to creep forward, swapping places with Billie Eilish's Birds Of A Feather to reach a new peak of No.2. She continues to have three Top 40 hits although Hot To Go suffers an annoying reverse and slides to No.23. The British end of things continues to be kept up by Myles Smith with Stargazing also edging to a new peak of No.4.

Burning Through Money

Now I'm sorry, we are going to have to talk about Austin again. With some of last week's hits making some rapid exits (of which more shortly) there is room for some upward momentum for others. And so after 16 weeks hurtling between positions 7 and 10 (and all the ones in between) Dasha's debut hit finally becomes a Top 5 single with a three places rise to No.5.

It remains the most extraordinary of chart runs, not only because of its record-breaking five consecutive weeks trapped at No.10. Now 23 weeks old the track has been at risk of a fall to ACR for the past three months, yet never quite manages to succumb. That made me wonder just how it had managed it. So here for your delectation let me present to you Dasha's weekly chart sales performance ever since its seventh week on the Top 100, at which point the ACR clock theoretically can start ticking.

So there you have the proof. Three times the single has been on the edge, declining in streams for two consecutive weeks only to bounce back again and have the clock reset. We can now add another to those numbers, as on its 23rd week around the single is No.5 with a chart sale of 33,018 meaning yes, another rise and another reset of the clock. So Austin won't tumble to ACR until the schools go back at the earliest. Those boots still have some walking to do.

New to the Top 10 and continuing its impressive momentum is Kisses from Bl3ss x Camrinwatsin. The song of the summer still doesn’t have an official video (will they ever get round to making one?) but at least has an "official" lyric reel. We can go all night if needed. Along with Myles Smith the British duo are the only British acts in the Top 10.

Pop! Hits.

After wondering aloud last week what we should call tracks that appeal to a fanbase and nobody else, the obvious answer came through on social media.

My suggestion for "a name for the phenomenon of K-pop hits popping a number for fanbases but failing to cross over to anyone else" is 'Bubble Pop' - lots of people can create bubbles but no-one can catch them!

— Phil Annets (@PhilAnnets) July 27, 2024

Two of last week's theoretical bubble hits make their expected reverses in this frame, although in fairness their falls aren't as large as they might have been. Jimin was not able to sustain the Top 5 momentum of Who, but the single only reverses as far as No.11 - although that is still enough to ensure it might repeat the Top 10 - Top 20 - Top 30 pattern of his last hit. Perhaps unlucky is Jade's Angel Of My Dreams which was tracking for a second week in the Top 10 on early flashes but instead dips to No.13. Rave reviews it may have had, and a compelling single it remains. But the audience for Little Mix solo singles remains nailed to latent Little Mix fans. None of them have stood tall as long-standing chart hits in their own right. And that must remain frustrating for everyone involved.

There are still plenty of other hits with upward momentum which is never not pleasing to see. The BRAT summer continues for Charli XCX as both her singles move up in tandem. 360 hits another new peak of No.12 while Apple is similarly only the rise, breaking into the Top 20 at No.14.

Drift Away

Also new to the Top 20 is Move from Adam Port and collaborators (oh OK then Stryv, Keinemusik, Orso & Malachiii to give them their full names. Like all the best Afrobeats hits this is a thing of great beauty, particularly in the extended version which for now remains the only remotely "official" YouTube upload of the track.

Pardners

So it is down to the lower depths we go for the big new arrivals of the week. The highest new entry is the latest instalment in Post Malone's country era as he seems to be working his way through the address book of some of the biggest contemporary names in the genre. Hard on the heels of Morgan Wallen duet I Had Some Help comes Guy For That. This time he teams up with Luke Combs, best known for his smash hit (in American anyway) cover of Tracy Chapman's Fast Car. Perhaps the novelty is wearing off a little, Guy For That opens at a lowly No.26 - or perhaps the continuing appeal of former No.2 hit I Had Some Help is to blame. The latter is just two places below at No.28 and would of course be far higher still had it not reversed to ACR a fortnight ago.

Movie *Sync

We began 2024 with a handful of revived hits from fully 20 years earlier thanks to the likes of Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Natasha Bedingfield. But now the turn of the millennium revivalism takes a further step with the return of Bye Bye Bye from *Nsync to the charts. The boy band that turned Justin Timberlake into a star landed what was then their biggest hit single to date when it first slammed onto the chart at No.3 in March 2000. If it sounds to modern ears like an old Britney Spears hit then you aren't far wrong, the track just like hers at the time produced by Max Martin whose crashing productions were the defining sound of American pop at the start of the 2000s. This 2024 chart return is prompted by the track's inclusion on the soundtrack of Deadpool & Wolverine, the Marvel Cinematic Universe not for the first time dragging ancient pop culture back to new relevance. Music Week this week notes that Bye Bye Bye owes its chart position to an automatic ACR reset. The other golden oldie featured on the soundtrack - Madonna's Like A Prayer - doesn't benefit from this and so is absent from the chart, this despite its own streams being enough to theoretically propel it to a position just outside the Top 40.

On a more contemporary tip Gen Z Luv hands Central Cee another misfiring new entry at No.34, but two places below comes another reunion of a potentially nuclear pairing. Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding (for it is they) debut with new single Free, this now the pair's fourth chart hit in collaboration with each other. Ellie first appeared alongside the Scotsman on 2013s I Need Your Love (No.4), 2014s Outside (No.6) but of course most notably last year's smash hit Miracle which enjoyed an eight week spell in total at No.1. Free opens slowly, but the pair are indeed dynamite together and there is truly no telling where this is going to end up.

That's too many hits for one week, but keep an ear out for the next big thing in contemporary country. Machine Gun Kelly and Jelly Roll's Lonely Road, a reinterpretation if you will of John Denver's classic Take Me Home Country Roads. It is new at No.67, but I'm hoping we get to feature it properly some time in the next fortnight.