It’s another extremely quiet week for the singles.

1. Ed Sheeran – “Shivers”

Three weeks, but if you combine it with the preceding run of “Bad Habits”, it’s a total of 14 weeks. If he manages another, he matches Drake’s 15-week monopoly from 2015 (though Drake did it with just one single).

3. Coldplay & BTS – “My Universe”

Well, that’s certainly two acts I wouldn’t have expected to find on the same record. I’m not sure anyone ever listened to a BTS record and thought “If only they were doing a Coldplay song”, but here it is. It’s the second single from the next Coldplay album and very much Coldplay’s record; the all-purpose upliftingness is a reasonable fit for BTS, to be fair, but it’s still just kind of what you expect from the big single for a Coldplay album, just with bits of it in Korean.

It’s the highest position for a Coldplay single since “Something Just Like This” reached number 2 in 2017 – which, come to think of it, was a similarly unlikely collaboration with the Chainsmokers. For BTS, it equals their all-time peak reached with “Butter” and “Dynamite”, and becomes their fourth top ten hit in just over a year. If nothing else, BTS have quite clearly now crossed over to become a regular feature of the singles chart, not just a cult act who make fleeting appearances through first-week fan sales.

23. SHOUSE – “Love Tonight”

SHOUSE are an Australia / New Zealand duo, making their first appearance on the chart. This is a four-year-old track which has suddenly picked up traction on, you guessed it, TikTok. Yes, that’s a choir on the record – apparently it’s a mixture of amateurs and some musical types from Melbourne. Once again, TikTok has hit on an obscure record that’s actually good.

The video above is a re-edit which has been put together for the track’s current surge of popularity; the original video from 2017 is pretty much a home video consisting of the raw footage of the choir. The 2021 video editor is working overtime to make it look more professional.

And… that’s it. That’s your new entries for this week. As for climbers…

• “Love Nwantiti (Ah Ah Ah)” by CKay climbs 9-4.
• “My Heart Goes (La Di Da)” by Becky Hill & Topic climbs 20-17.
• “Meet Me At Our Spot” by The Anxiety (Willow & Tyler Cole) climbs 29-24.
• “If You Really Love Me (How Will I Know)” by David Guetta, Mistajam & John Newman climbs 31-27, finally breaking the top 30 in its fifth week on chart.
• “Better Days” by Dermot Kennedy climbs 35-31.

The album chart is a bit busier. A bit.

1. The Lathums – “How Beautiful Life Can Be”

Debut album from a group of indie throwbacks from Wigan. Wigan’s not exactly famous as a hotbed of music, but it did produce the Verve, and if you’re going to have one famous local band, you could do a lot worse.

2. Public Service Broadcasting – “Bright Magic”

Public Service Broadcasting made their name by making instrumentals overlaid with speech samples from old public information films. And some of those records are excellent – “People Will Always Need Coal” is a bleakly ironic catalogue of shattered promises, for example. But we’re four albums in and they’re understandably diversifying now. This is a concept album about Berlin, lighter on the samples, heavier on the guest singers. It’s their highest placed album to date, beating the number 4 peak of its predecessor “Every Valley”.

10. Natalie Imbruglia – “Firebird”

Effectively a comeback album – she released a covers album in 2015 but hasn’t released an original studio album since 2009, and she hasn’t had one chart since “Counting Down the Days” reached number 1 in 2005.

17. Angels & Airwaves – “Lifeforms”

US rock band. It’s their sixth album, following a seven year hiatus. They had some success in the UK with their first two albums in 2006-7 – their debut got to number 6 and they even got a single into the top 20 – but we haven’t heard from them since then.

39. Sleep Token – “This Place Will Become Your Tomb”

Their second album and their first to make the top 40. They’re a rock act, if you hadn’t guessed from the title (oh, and the label is called Spinefarm). They’re an anonymous masked group who claim to worship the ancient deity Sleep which, apparently, appeared to their lead singer Vessel in a dream. Alright then.

40. Mostack – “High Street Kid 2”

Officially a mixtape. His previous album – a proper album – got to number 3 in 2019, but mixtapes do routinely place way below official albums. Does that make it a smart way of distancing side projects that were never intended to have the same commercial appeal, or an inadvisable way of telling people they can skip this one? This is a 40 minute record – it could have been called an album.