Taylor Swift breaks Arctic Monkeys chart-topping streak
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After her own new album shot to the top of the charts on Friday, Taylor Swift deprived the Arctic Monkeys of their seventh consecutive number-one album.
Her tenth album, Midnights, had 204,000 equivalent sales in the first week, making it the 2022 record for fastest-selling album.
The rock group from Sheffield came in second with more than 100,000 chart sales for The Car in just seven days.
In a typical week without Swift’s competition, that quantity of sales would have been sufficient to get her the number one spot.
The American singer more than doubled the sales of her album 1989’s 2014 debut week, which was her previous best opening week performance.
The 32-year-old’s single from his most recent album, Anti-Hero, also peaked at number one on this week’s singles chart.
Swift’s appropriately titled album has now outsold Harry Styles’ third album, Harry’s House, to set the UK record for the year’s quickest sales.
She accomplished it in just ten years, but Madonna needed 21 years to accomplish the same thing. On the overall league table for the most number one albums, the Queen of Pop still has an advantage over Swift.
Swift’s new album, Midnights, marks her return to a more commercial sound after the acoustic tone of her previous two studio albums. It is her first original studio album in two years.
Fans gobbled it up, breaking the record for the most albums streamed on Spotify in a single day.
The new album carries over some of the folky appeal of its sibling records, Folklore and Evermore, both of which were issued in 2020, the year of the epidemic. With songs that focus on more intimate topics, she also re-engages her pop sensibilities.
The Arctic Monkeys, recent headliners at Reading and Leeds, will be frustrated that their follow-up to the disputed Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, which represented a turn toward a more expansive, cinematic sound, did not add to their collection of six number-one albums.
The Car, which was also released last Friday, spins in the same sonic universe as its predecessor while being tighter and more immediate. It features exquisitely crafted orchestral, soulful, and occasionally funky tracks like There’d Better Be a Mirror Ball and Body Paint.