Drake Holds the Top While Britain Swelters Through Radiohead and Smurfs

Drake claims number one with *Habibti*, though PinkPantheress trails by just two thousand listeners. The gap is negligible. Neither seems particularly secure.

What's striking is the archive material wedged between current releases. A posthumous Michael Jackson soundtrack at three. *KID A MNESIA* at four, five years after its release. Fleetwood Mac's reissue at seventeen. The UK chart has always been friendlier to catalog than America's, but this week feels especially nostalgic for sounds already codified.

Radiohead's continued presence says something about British listening habits that Tame Impala's *Deadbeat* at five only reinforces. Psych-rock never really left here. It just moved indoors and got quieter.

The Charli XCX album title *Wuthering Heights* is either brilliant or unbearable depending on your tolerance for literary references in hyperpop. Forty-six thousand listeners have apparently made peace with it.

Olivia Rodrigo's Glastonbury BBC recording outperforms two separate Lady Gaga releases and a Taylor Swift album. Live recordings still carry weight when the festival is correct and the broadcast quality holds. Drake appears twice in the top twenty. So does Sabrina Carpenter, so does Gaga. Repetition as strategy.

Rihanna contributes a Smurfs soundtrack cut at nine. The decision to take that session, or what it indicates about film music budgets in 2025, remains opaque.

The hottest May day on record arrived this week. Thirty-four degrees and Britain is streaming Radiohead, Fleetwood Mac, and a children's film soundtrack. Not escapism, exactly. Something else. Avoidance, maybe. Or just habits too deep to break even when the weather does.