Dribbler
It is a clash of the titans which will surely define the back end of this year (which, and I don’t want to scare anyone with this detail, is actually just a few weeks away.
It is Sabrina Carpenter v Taylor Swift. Two women arguably both at the peak of their powers (despite Swift's now veteran status) and both with some quite eagerly anticipated new albums. It would have been incredibly sweet to have had them released at the same time and going head to head in a sales and streams race, but no matter. Tracking which record will be the biggest, which will do the most numbers, and which will contain the biggest hits, will be the big story of Q4. Other superstar returns notwithstanding.
This week Sabrina gets the jump on her rival, unleashing her provocatively titled Man's Best Friend album. Her seventh studio release in all, the follow-up to 2024's behemoth Short N' Sweet and home already to the preview single Manchild. With a sense of grim inevitability, it is the biggest record release of the week bar none. Man's Best Friend debuts at No.1 on the albums chart with a colossal sale of over 85,000 - 13,000 CDs, 27,000 LPs, 7,000 Cassettes (really), 825 downloads (lol) and the rest naturally as a result of streams.
That's actually a tiny way short of the debut numbers of its predecessor a year ago, and not quite enough to rank as the biggest single week sale of the year (that honour still held by Sam Fender who reached six figures in the spring). But enough to outsell the rest of the Top 10 put together. That almost goes without saying. Small commiserations go then to No.2 artist CMAT, worshipped by Guardian writers and pulling in 16,000 sales for her Euro-Country album. In many other weeks that would probably have helped her to the top of the charts. But her timing was just that little bit off.
Hits
With those kind of numbers you would have expected Sabrina Carpenter to be doing a clean sweep of the singles chart too, but although she does enjoy a smattering of large hits (and many others starred-out), she's nowhere near approaching the summit. That leaves the way clear for Golden to reign supreme once more, the K-Pop Demon Hunters single handing the fictional Huntr/X a fifth non-consecutive week at the top of the Official UK Singles chart. The song still hasn’t peaked either, increasing in sales once more to a tad over 69,000 and doing numbers no single has done since the spring.
Just like CMAT, Olivia Dean suffers from incredibly poor timing. Man I Need is also surging in both popularity and chart sales, locking in at No.2 with a sale of just over 59,000 which - yes - would indeed be plenty to see her nestling at the top at any other time.
The big numbers being done by the chart 1 and 2 perhaps explains why it hasn't quite ended up Sabrina Carpenter's week. The biggest track from her album is Tears (essentially the album's second single) which slams into place at No.3 to become her fifth Top 3 hit single on these shores and her second of the year so far. The track is once again very her; a disco throwback with nods to Yes Sir I Can Boogie and something else I can't place right now, incredibly rude lyrics (the tears in question aren't falling from her eyes), and even a video with its own twists - eagle-eyed observers have noted the YouTube upload cycles has cycled through multiple different endings in the week since it has been uploaded with her boyfriend meeting a different method of demise in each one (in the one where he seems to survive she kills him anyway, noting that "someone has to die in every video".
More Woodwork
Hard on Tears' heels is its predecessor Manchild which you will notice did not appear in initial midweek sales flashes as it was pending a reset from the ACR it tumbled to a couple of weeks ago. It is now back at No.4 for what should be another extended Top 10 run. The album's third designated hit is My Man On Willpower which debuts at No.7. Missing from that list then is Sugar Talking which was expected to be one of three Top 10 debuts for her, only to be disqualified by the re-emergence of Manchild. That track actually ended the week as the sixth biggest track from the album, out-streamed by When Did You Get Hot and House Tour - all of them in theory doing enough numbers to be Top 10 hits were the current chart rules not in place.
So that's Sabrina's debut, and she has three weeks or so to herself until Taylor comes along. We're left marvelling just how she manages an image that is so sexually provocative (songs with lyrics that might as well all say "jizz on my tits baby", an album cover where she's literally about to unzip a bloke's flies) and yet manages to be so sexless herself. The artificial nature of it all somehow sucks all the soul out of it.#
I Ain't Happy
Look, I won't lie. I'm scanning the listings in vain for something else to tell you about. Coldplay's summer series of concerts in London continue (transport strikes and all) meaning their returning golden oldies consolidate their chart positions. That means a rise to No.17 for Yellow and perhaps more notably a rise to No.19 for Sparks, the 25-year-old album cut finally becoming a Top 20 single.
But bringing older hits back into the charts to accompany live gigs now appears to be a trend. Following Oasis and Coldplay come - of all acts - Gorillaz, the animated supergroups that combines the vocal talents of Damon Albarn and the illustrations of Jamie Hewlett in a concept which at the start of the century managed to redefine "art pop" for its own twisted ends. Celebrating their own 25th anniversary was a pop-up arena at London's Copperbox where in daily live shows their performed their first three albums as well as debuting a set of new songs. The band also were added to the arena in Fortnite, which let's face it is a more comfortable home for the gruesome cast of characters.
So while there is a new album on the way, for now the group return to the charts with one of their more notable hit singles Feel Good Inc., originally a No.2 hit in 2005 but which now returns to the fray at No.30. Whereas the hits from their self-titled debut required extensive remixes to propel them into the charts, this debut offering from the follow-up Demon Days required no such surgery, marking the point at which the Gorillaz concept was able to make commercial concessions to generate hit singles but also the moment where popular taste had evolved to meet them in the middle. The single was also notable for its clever circumventing of the chart rules of the day. It seems so quaint now but when downloads were first permitted to count for the singles chart the rule was that they had to correspond to a physically released single (high street stores unwilling to contemplate chart displays featuring records they couldn't actually sell). To get around this Feel Good Inc. was initially released in a strictly limited edition form, with few enough promo singles made that it was almost impossible to get hold of one, but enough to ensure that for the first four weeks of its chart life it was uniquely a single that was only available for download. That wasn't enough at the time to push it past No.20, the final leap to a peak of No.2 only arriving when the single was made available properly in physical form.
There is still much to be said about the whys and wherefores of catalogue tracks and Golden Oldies clogging up the lower reaches of the Top 40. But when they are this historically significant, who are we to complain? And it kind of seems appropriate that it should be yet another cartoon.
