Alex Warren has a ninth Ordinary week at the top of the singles chart. Sleep Token get their first number one album.

Alex Warren’s run at the top of the singles chart continues as Ordinary gets a ninth week  at number one. The last single to spend exactly nine weeks at the top came fairly recently - Sabrina Carpenter’s Taste last autumn.

Ravyn Lenae’s Love Me Not is still at number two. Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club still tethered at number three. WithTheMC with added Bees & Honey remain at number four with Show me Love. Sombr’s Undressed continues its steady climb up the chart. It is up one palace to number five.

Calvin Harris made his chart debut with Acceptable In The 80s in 2007. Since then, he has had at least one top forty hit every year. He extends that run to an impressive nineteenth year with Blessings at number eight. The song is sung byClementine Douglas who now has four top forty hits as a featured artist or part of a duo but has yet to chart on her own. It is Harris’s 31st top ten hit and his 44th song to reach the top forty.

Austrian producer Ely Oaks enters at number 35 with Borderline. He is joined by Lavinia who was born in Italy but raised in the UK. She then moved to Berlin where Ely Oaks also lives. Borderline is one place higher than Oaks’ previous hit Running Around.

After climbing to number 21 twice, Benson Boone’s Sorry I’m Here For Someone Else finally makes it into the top twenty at number twenty. It is in its eleventh week in the top forty. Myles Smith’s Nice To meet You climbs back up to numb ten. It was last in the top ten in January but has remained in the top twenty all year.

This does not mean that there is another lack of new entries and re-entries in the singles chart this week. It’s just that some of them fit in better with the albums round-up. Speaking of which,...

It has been an extraordinarily successful year for rock band Sleep Token. At the beginning of the year, their chart record comprised two top forty albums, including a number three hit, and no hit singles. In March, they had their first hit single with two more following in April and May. The singles weren’t even flash-in-the-pans, two of them gained further weeks in the top forty. That meant that hopes for the new album were high, with the likelihood that they would get their first number one album. That has indeed come to pass as Even In Arcadia, a pretty strong album, finishes clear of all rivals this week.

The old-fashioned among us will welcome the length of the tracks, and the album itself. Stereophonics’ recent chart-topper had just eight tracks with a running time under half-an-hour. Sleep Token’s album, by contrast, has ten tracks with a running time a few minutes short of an hour.

Tracks from Even In Arcadia are in the singles chart once again. Look To Windward, one of the tracks not made available in advance, is at number 38. Caramel, which reached number ten last month, is a re-entry at number 33 and the album’s title track is at number  31. They have now had five top forty hits, highly unusual for a rock band.

Some recent number one albums have picked up only around 1,000 “sales” from streams, some significantly lower than that. Unusually for a rock album, Even In Arcadia has around 7,000 “sales” from streams. Whether the album continues to be streamed in significant numbers next week remains to be seen.

Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ‘n’ Sweet gets a 24th week at number two. It now holds the record for the most weeks at number two, beating the record for a studio album held by Simon and garfunkel’s fabulous Bridge Over Troubled Water album. That album’s 23 weeks were spread over a period of over two years. Carpenter’s run has taken about nine months. Ed Sheeran’s Tour Collection is at number four.

While The Kooks can hardly claim to be among the very best bands to come out of Brighton, their song Naive is regularly one of the most streamed songs from 2006. Nevertheless, they still manage to sell albums in reasonable numbers - most of the time. Their last album, 2022’s 10 Tracks To Echo In The Darks only got to number 32, making it their lowest charting album by some margin. By contrast, album number seven Never / Know enters at number five, their highest position since Konk reached number two in 2008.

There is a certain degree of pinkness to two of the new entries and that is without anything new from the singer born Alecia Moore. PinkPantheress enters the top ten of the albums chart for the first time with her mixtape Fancy That. Arcade Fire are at number eighteen with Pink Elephant. Any hope that they might one day match the excellence of Funeral is surely long gone.

The final new entry comes from Berkshire-based The Amazons. Their new album 21st Century Fiction, probably my favourite of last week’s releases, is at number 26.

Last week saw the release of a film to accompany The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow album. As a result, it leaps back into the top forty at number 25. Timeless from the album, which featured Playboy Carti reached number seven last year. It returns to the top forty this week at number thirty. The album contains a remix of the song by one of the current flavours of the month, Doechii.