The First TOP 20 Arrived. The Oldest Album Won.
The first edition of the TOP 20 Albums Worldwide spans fifteen genres, thirty-four countries, and one eleven-year-old album that outsold its own successor.
An eleven-year-old album at number five
The TOP 20 Albums Worldwide published its first edition this week — a weekly chart of independent albums, ranked without reference to streams, playlists, or social engagement — and the most interesting thing on it is not at number one.
Skylar Spence holds positions five and six. They are in the wrong order. Almost Butterflies, the 2026 album, sits at six. Hit Vibes, the 2015 debut — released when Ryan DeRobertis was still using the name Saint Pepsi, before a cola company’s legal department ended that — sits one position above it. The audience that came for the new record went back and bought the catalogue in the same week. Four out of five fans are American. The eleven-year-old album outsold its successor.
When a new release and a back catalogue sit on the same page, one purchase leads to another before the listener has closed the tab. Hit Vibes did not chart because people remembered it. It charted because people found it.
Thirty-four countries and a thousand-person town
The geography column is where the chart declares what kind of chart it is.
Younger Brother enter at number one with their first album in fifteen years, and their audience spans thirty-four countries. Less than half American. Britain, Israel, Germany, Australia — the map reads like two decades of international touring preserved in data. MONO at seven show a similar shape: twenty-seven years of live performance across sixty countries producing the broadest audience on the chart.
Then the other extreme. Tha Trickaz at thirteen: nearly nine in ten buyers are French. Keelan McGrath at nineteen: almost exclusively Irish, a button accordion player from Borrisokane, County Tipperary, population roughly a thousand, who won the Seán Ó Riada Gold Medal at sixteen. TMTCH Present The Wave at two — The Men They Couldn’t Hang, crowdfunding demos from a shed studio forty-two years into a career — more than four in five buyers British.
The globally scattered entries and the hyper-local ones are not opposites. They are the same phenomenon measured at different stages: a specific audience, buying with specificity.
Fifteen years, twenty years, forty-one years
The first TOP 20 has a structural theme, and it is patience.
Younger Brother at one: fifteen years between albums. Simon Posford stayed busy with Shpongle and Hallucinogen; the project named after a Kogi prophecy about Western civilisation simply went quiet. Mutually Assured Distraction broke the silence, and thirty-four countries noticed.
Warning at ten: twenty years. Their second record, Watching from a Distance, quietly grew into one of the most celebrated doom metal albums ever made. The new one is a pre-order — five tracks recorded in a 140-year-old former church in Southport — already in the top ten on the strength of a single lead track.
Neurosis at seventeen: seven years, forty-one as a band. SUNN O))) at eight: six years, first record for Sub Pop, no collaborators for the first time in the band’s history, eighty minutes, Mark Rothko on the cover.
A chart that is not driven by streaming frequency has a natural affinity for artists who take their time. The audience does not need reminding. It needs a reason.
Griselda on four continents, and other entries of note
Brother Tom Sos at three — the sole hip-hop entry, a Griselda Records debut from Buffalo with the widest geographic distribution in the top ten. Less than half the fans American. Britain and Germany each holding meaningful shares. Griselda built an audience that buys like crate-diggers, and the crate-diggers are on four continents.
goreshit holds both nine and fourteen. Two albums from the same breakcore catalogue, bought in a seven-day window by an audience overwhelmingly American despite the artist being British. Orcutt Shelley Miller at four: Bill Orcutt’s noise-rock fretwork, Steve Shelley’s Sonic Youth precision, Ethan Miller’s Comets on Fire heaviness, one room. Thundercat at twelve, the only entry that sounds like jazz. Flea at twenty, a trumpet-led record with Thom Yorke and Nick Cave on Nonesuch Records.
The full chart, with per-entry narratives and country breakdowns, is at skaldera.com/top. Next week, some of these will hold position. The ones that stay will tell us something the first edition cannot.
Contributing Writer