TOP 20 Albums Worldwide, Week 17

16 new, 2 survivors, 3 pre-orders at the summit

16 new entries. Again. For the second consecutive week, the chart has torn itself down to the studs and rebuilt with almost entirely fresh material. What filled that space is wider than a single description can hold: a Nottingham EP rescued from an Oxfam bin for 49 pence, a Belfast trio reclaiming a word that started in Irish mythology and ended as a sectarian slur, a 60-minute ambient score from a death metal band recorded at the same Berlin studio where Bowie tracked Heroes, and a collective re-enacting the mythology of The KLF in village halls along a ley line from Stonehenge to Liverpool. Two holdovers survived. One of them is still at number one. Denver, Colorado places 2 acts in the top 5, connected by a single drummer. We start at 20.

A long reach from the Avalon Peninsula

The songs on Picture Day were written across the Fencesitters’ teenage years, and the record wears that origin without apology. Jangly and restless in one breath, slow and bruised in the next, sometimes inside the same track. A four-piece out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, releasing music since 2021, the debut full-length gathering what was scattered across EPs and splits into something that holds its shape. 3 in 4 listeners are American, which is a long reach from the Avalon Peninsula for a band this quiet.

49 pence

In 2000, 4 school friends in Nottingham pressed roughly 30 copies of an EP called D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L onto CD-Rs, sent a handful to labels who never wrote back, and broke up. One of those discs found its way to an Oxfam shop in Sherwood. 16 years later, a stranger bought it for 49 pence and uploaded the corrupted audio to a forum. 4 years after that, fans traced vocalist Owain Davies through a Facebook barcode and a hunch about Nottingham. His reply was one word: “Yeah.”

Panchiko reformed without having planned to, accumulated millions of listeners, and now sit at 19. Their second studio album Ginkgo arrived in April 2025. Their first proper headline tours sold out before the announcement was cold. The kind of accident that could not happen twice.

Northern England’s quiet stronghold

Gilles Peterson called Nat Birchall one of the finest musicians in the country. What people find when they go looking is a tenor and soprano saxophonist in the north of England who threads Jamaican roots and dub through Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders until the pairing stops sounding unlikely and starts sounding like the only way it could have gone. He helped shape Manchester’s spiritual jazz movement alongside trumpeter Matthew Halsall, beginning with a debut in 1999 and gaining wider recognition with the 2009 cult record Akhenaten. Live at Low Four Studio, Manchester does what the title says. Close to 4 out of 5 listeners are British. The music does not travel far, but it does not need to.

23 releases, one name

23 releases since 2014, under several aliases — a l e x, SOJUDA, FLYING CHILDREN — all gradually consolidated under one name, as though the sprawl itself became the point. Alicks is a self-taught musician from Georgia whose catalogue moves from delicate lo-fi sketches to 10-minute drone constructions. Track titles like “grinding repetition” and “silently existing” set the mood before a note is played. The Reaper sits at 17. The album before it, Requiems, was dedicated to 3 grandfathers. The audience is almost entirely American.

A Bavarian drummer, a Nigerian master’s desk, a Jamaican form

The mixing console on this record is the original Decca desk Fela Kuti used in Lagos. Captain Yossarian is Manuel da Coll, a Munich-based drummer who runs Studio Katzlbaum from a small workspace in the Untergiesing district. He takes 4 Afrobeat classics and rebuilds them as Jamaican discomix on purely analogue equipment. He is also a founding member of LaBrassBanda, the Bavarian brass outfit who play in lederhosen and once performed on a ski slope, which tells you something about the breadth of address. His 2021 debut Bob in Dub caught the ear of Don Letts on BBC 6 Music and landed in Helmut Phillips’ book DUB — The Sound of Surprise.

Fela Kuti in Dub sits at 16 with the most scattered audience in the lower chart. Britain at 28%, Japan at 12%, Germany, France, and America filling the margins. A Bavarian, a Nigerian master’s recordings, a Jamaican form. The geography of the music has never cared about the geography of the map.

The natural shape of a Tricky record

12 places down from number 3. Tricky’s Different When It’s Silent entered high last week and is finding its level, which is the natural shape of a record by someone who has never chased a chart in his life. Adrian Thaws co-produced “Daydreaming,” the first single from Massive Attack’s 1991 debut Blue Lines, left, built Maxinquaye — drums buried in murk, a half-rapped vocal in an asthmatic whisper — and spent 3 decades making music no one else has managed to replicate. This is his 15th studio album. The audience stretches across 5 countries without concentrating in any of them. The geography of a career that has never settled in one place either.

A garage in Leeds, a saxophone in Manchester

A disused garage in Leeds stocked with vintage 1960s equipment, recording exclusively to two-inch tape. That is ATA Records, and Outer Worlds Jazz Ensemble is its flagship project: bassist and label founder Neil Innes building sessions around the scene’s working sidemen and visiting soloists, the kind of players who show up knowing more than the arrangements require. The debut paired Chip Wickham’s baritone saxophone with rhythms that owed as much to New Orleans street jazz as to the eastern modal tradition. The Kármán Line goes wider: flute and harp drifting over impressionistic piano on some tracks, bassoon and French horn channelling 1970s Quincy Jones on others. About two-thirds of the audience is British.

Northern England’s second spiritual jazz entry in 3 positions. The genre’s quiet stronghold is becoming hard to ignore.

The wanderer returns

Mutually Assured Distraction sat at number one 2 weeks ago, vanished entirely, reappeared at 15, and now climbs to 13. Whatever trajectory this record is tracing, it is not a conventional one. Simon Posford and Benji Vaughan, the producers behind Hallucinogen, Shpongle, and Prometheus, named their duo Younger Brother after a Kogi prophecy in which the indigenous Colombian tribe reserves the title for the people of Western civilisation. The Last Days of Gravity came one place outside a Mercury Prize nomination. Vaccine brought Joe Russo and Marc Brownstein into the live band. The record keeps leaving, and the record keeps coming back.

11 entries in, and a few things are becoming legible. 2 spiritual jazz records from northern England, Nat Birchall in Manchester at 18 and Outer Worlds Jazz Ensemble in Leeds at 14, both recorded on analogue equipment in rooms that would not make a city guidebook. Tricky settled 12 places at 15, Younger Brother climbed 2 at 13: week-two entries tracing opposite arcs through the same chart. KLFRS COMMUNICATIONS at 12 is the most geographically concentrated entry the chart has seen in weeks, 89% of the audience from one country, a village hall tour, a ley line. The audience keeps splitting 2 ways — overwhelmingly American in some entries, overwhelmingly British in others, rarely mixed. 16 new entries for the second week running, which means the top 10 is again almost entirely uncharted ground. 9 to go.

£10 notes in village halls

The first 100 copies were exchanged for a £10 note at village hall tour dates, hand to hand, no distributor, no webshop. KLFRS COMMUNICATIONS is the live recording project of The KLF Re-Enactment Society, a collective dedicated to re-enacting the history and mythology of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s KLF. CALM DOWN, captured at Pre-Skool at Static in Liverpool and released on St George’s Day, maps a sonic journey along the K-Line — the geographic axis from Stonehenge to Liverpool that runs through KLF lore like a ley line through chalk. 9 tracks named after places along the route. Cannock Chase. Battersea. Stockwell. The running times stretch and contract with the distances between them.

89% of the audience is British. No other entry on this chart has a geographic concentration this absolute.

The archaeology made to feel like a party

Luca Venezia was skating New York and haunting CBGBs before he stumbled into early-nineties raves, and that collision — punk attitude meeting dancefloor electronics in a room where neither was fully welcome — became the permanent address of everything he has done since. As CURSES, now based in Berlin with his own Safer At Night imprint, he curates the Next Wave Acid Punx compilation series: 3 volumes deep, each one a dig through hard-to-find club music spanning industrial origins to the present day. TROIS is the latest, and the audience is the most evenly spread on this chart. Germany, America, Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, each contributing roughly equal shares. Few producers track their influences this meticulously, and fewer still make the archaeology feel like a party.

A Paris label in the only currency that matters

A label turning 10. The celebration is 16 tracks drawn from a decade of its own roster — BAUGRUPPE90, Seigg, JKS, Zisko, Random Order, a Mark Broom remix — and the result works as both document and floor-filler. Molekül has always operated from Paris with a single proposition: peak-time techno that hits without losing the groove. The audience on this chart reflects what that means in practice. Germany at 25%, France at 23%, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland filling the rest. No American presence to speak of. Continental European to the bone.

The word that started as warrior and ended as slur

Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, DJ Próvaí. 3 Belfast MCs who rap in Irish and English, treating the language itself as resistance. KNEECAP’s FENIAN releases today, but 4 advance singles and a pre-order campaign carried it to number 9 during the chart week. Produced by Dan Carey, the same hands behind Fontaines D.C. and Wet Leg. The title reclaims a word that traces back to the Fianna, the warriors of Irish mythology, passed through a 19th-century republican brotherhood, and landed in the present as something shouted across sectarian lines.

The album was originally scheduled for April 24, the 110th anniversary of the Easter Rising. It was delayed by a week. In 2025, KNEECAP lost their US visa sponsor after messages displayed onstage at Coachella, cancelled a North American tour, and walked into the studio with Dan Carey carrying all of it. Mo Chara spent part of the sessions dealing with a terrorism charge, later dismissed, for allegedly displaying a flag at a concert.

Carey built the tracks primarily on analogue synthesisers. Móglaí Bap wrote lyrics for “Cold at the Top” while spending about an hour a day in a bathtub, which is the kind of detail that sounds like mythology until you learn it is not. The album closes with “Irish Goodbye,” a collaboration with Kae Tempest, about his mother’s depression and her death. Ramallah-based rapper Fawzi and Irish musician Radie Peat appear elsewhere on the record.

More than half the audience is from Britain — which, given that KNEECAP are from Belfast, is both expected and complicated.

7 centuries older than the label 3 places below

Paris again, but the music is 7 centuries older. Véhémence places blastbeat-driven black metal against hurdy-gurdy, nyckelharpa, and flute, all sung in French and rooted in medieval sagas. Multi-instrumentalist Tulzcha and vocalist B.R. have been building this since 2013, each record widening the ensemble: Par le Sang Versé in 2019, Ordalies with a full guest cast in 2022, and now Assiégé Pour l’Éternité, the 4th, due June on Antiq Records. France leads the audience at about a third.

2 Paris entries in 3 positions, and the genres could not be further apart. But Paris has never been a city that restricts itself to one idea at a time.

The format is the philosophy

No tracklist. No artwork beyond a stamped label. 2 sides, sequentially numbered, pressed to 12-inch vinyl, distributed through Hard Wax in Berlin. That is the WAX project, the stripped-down techno alias of René Pawlowitz. He grew up in Schwedt near the Polish border, discovered the music through East German radio, and started visiting Hard Wax in 1992 before eventually working behind its counter. As Shed, his 2008 debut Shedding the Past was Resident Advisor’s album of the year. As WAX, EQD, Head High, WK7, Hoover1, and at least a dozen others, he has built more aliases than most producers have releases. No. 11110 sits at 7. Germany leads at roughly a third. The format is the philosophy: no playing around, no effects, just the music.

Settling, not sinking

4 places down from number 2, and SpaceAcre’s Life’s a Bitch Mixtape is settling in its second week — a correction that still leaves a London duo in the upper half of a worldwide chart. Phoebe Little and Jas Scott write songs that arrive like arguments: big riffs, precise vocals, lyrics aimed at the jugular of greed and institutional rot. “Pathogen” drew a vocal reaction from Justin Hawkins of The Darkness. The audience is still split between Britain and America, the same transatlantic footprint as last week. The position moves. The ground holds.

5 entries remain, and Denver, Colorado is about to appear twice. Blood Incantation at 5 and Stormkeep at 2 share Isaac Faulk on drums and Arthur Rizk on mastering. One made a 60-minute ambient film score at the studio where Bowie made Heroes. The other made symphonic black metal about invented medieval kingdoms, with cover art by the man who drew Lobo and Judge Dredd. Both are pre-orders. At number one, another pre-order, from a studio in the Pentland Hills silent for 13 years. Three of the top 5 have not been released yet. The chart is placing its weight on what arrives next.

Pastoral where the band is usually tectonic

Blood Incantation recorded Absolute Elsewhere at Hansa Tonstudios in Berlin — the same rooms where Bowie tracked Heroes, Iggy Pop made Lust for Life, and Tangerine Dream cut Force Majeure — and it earned a 92 on Metacritic, one of 2024’s most lauded records in any genre. All Gates Open is the companion piece: a soundtrack to the 73-minute documentary about those sessions, directed by Niklas Tschaikowsky and Tammo Dehn. Members of Tangerine Dream appear in the film alongside the band, which is the kind of lineage that earns its own gravity.

The music was composed in 2021, before Absolute Elsewhere existed as a record. 4 tracks, 60 minutes, built from synth improvisations and acoustic instrumentation. Paul Riedl describes it as the “yang energy” to the shadowed atmospheres of Timewave Zero. Pastoral where the band is usually tectonic. Ambient where they are usually cavernous.

The Denver four-piece — Riedl on guitar and vocals, Morris Kolontyrsky on guitar, Jeff Barrett on fretless bass, and Isaac Faulk on drums — sits at 5. Due June 5 on Century Media. Remember that drummer’s name. It appears again in 2 entries.

2 Sams, one Los Angeles restaurant

Their debut was taped live outside a Los Angeles restaurant in 2018 and became a cult document. The track “BOA” later surfaced in the Netflix film Malcolm & Marie. Sam Gendel plays saxophone through so much electronics and synthesis that the instrument dissolves into something unrecognisable; Sam Wilkes plays bass with the precision of someone trained under Patrice Rushen and Leon “Ndugu” Chancler at USC Thornton, and uses it to dissolve the structure from underneath. UNRELATED is 4 albums into a partnership that resists classification. 8 tracks, 28 minutes.

86% of the audience is American. Whatever this music is, Los Angeles remains the only city that fully claims it.

Down and out in a bankrupt party supply store

Orwell had Paris and London. Emma Swift has Party City, the American chain that sold streamers and plastic tiaras until it went bankrupt and closed all 800 stores in 2024. Down And Out In Party City. The title does more work than most opening tracks.

She traded a career in Australian radio for East Nashville in 2013. Before the move, she hosted In the Pines on FBi Radio in Sydney and Revelator on Double J at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation — Americana shows, the kind where you play Townes Van Zandt at 2 a.m. and nobody changes the station. She has lived in Nashville since with the British cult musician Robyn Hitchcock.

Her 2020 collection of Dylan covers, Blonde on the Tracks, produced by Pat Sansone of Wilco, was born from a period she has described with a directness unusual even for singer-songwriters: “Sad, listless and desperate, I began singing Bob Dylan songs as a way to have something to wake up for.” The record placed in Rolling Stone’s ranking of the 80 greatest Dylan covers ever recorded.

The Resurrection Game in 2025 was the first full record of originals — mortality, depression, and what she calls radical self-acceptance, the kind of subject matter that either rings true or doesn’t, with no middle ground available. The new EP is 4 tracks, produced by Jordan Lehning at The Duck in East Nashville. One of them, “The Other Side of the Afternoon,” was recorded at Chale Abbey on the Isle of Wight. Due August 21 on Tiny Ghost Records. A UK tour supporting Hitchcock follows in the autumn.

3 out of 4 listeners are American. An EP not due for nearly 4 months sits at number 3 on a worldwide chart. Nashville keeps its hold on her address. The songs keep finding their way out.

Isaac Faulk again

The drummer from Blood Incantation at number 5 also built Stormkeep in 2017, assembling a Denver melodic black metal project under the name Otheyn Vermithrax and lacing mid-nineties European riff architecture with sprawling dungeon synth keyboards — a combination that was largely absent from contemporary metal when the band emerged. The 2020 EP Galdrum and the 2021 debut Tales of Othertime sold out multiple pressings. The Nocturnes of Iswylm continues the story: chapters of an invented world rather than standalone records.

Produced alongside Michael Zech. Mastered by Arthur Rizk, who also mastered the Blood Incantation score 3 places below. Cover art by Simon Bisley, whose career in a different medium runs a parallel arc of mythological violence: he redefined DC’s Lobo, won an Eisner Award for Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham, and his original Lobo #1 painting sold at auction for $192,000 in 2021. A black metal album about invented kingdoms, painted by the man who painted invented universes for a living. The fit is exact.

Due June 12 on Vesperian. A pre-order at number 2. Three-quarters of the audience is American. 2 Denver bands in the top 5, linked by one drummer, one mastering engineer, and a shared belief that metal has more rooms in it than most people are willing to explore.

The silence is almost over

The longest silence in their career produced the loudest return, and the return is holding. Boards of Canada remain at number one for a second week. Inferno is still a pre-order — 18 tracks, due May 29 on Warp Records — and the margin over the rest of the chart remains vast.

This week brought the announcement of listening sessions in 7 cities: Tokyo, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Glasgow, New York, Los Angeles. All on May 22, one week before the album drops. Tickets go on sale today. The tracklist, revealed alongside the announcement, reads like a table of contents for something no one has quite named yet: “Prophecy At 1420 MHz.” “Naraka.” “Blood In The Labyrinth.” “I Saw Through Platonia.” The continuous mix runs for exactly 70 minutes, and that number has carried meaning in their work since the beginning.

The audience splits evenly between America and Britain. The silence is almost over. The chart already knows.

The week in full

2 Denver bands in the top 5, connected by one drummer and one mastering engineer. 3 pre-orders holding down the summit. KNEECAP’s FENIAN landing on its release day at 9, beside a KLF re-enactment society selling records hand to hand in village halls. A Nottingham EP rescued from a charity shop bin for 49 pence. An Australian songwriter who swapped Orwell’s Paris and London for a bankrupt party supply chain, and the result sits at number 3 nearly 4 months before the record arrives. 16 new entries for the second week running, and a Scottish duo still at number one on the strength of an album no one has heard yet.

The full chart is here. It resets next week. Whether any of this survives is half the reason to pay attention.