The Internet Is Evil. Wake Up.

16 new, 4 survivors, none unscathed

16 new entries out of 20. That is not a chart refresh. It is a regime change.

Byzantine sacred music from a Greek Orthodox priest who plays fretless electric guitar through amplifier worship. A protest single from Bristol with Tom Waits riding shotgun. A 13-year silence from a bunker in the Scottish Highlands, broken by cryptic VHS tapes and a pre-order that bent the chart out of shape. If there is a pattern, the pattern is the absence of one. 20 entries. We begin at the bottom, looking up.

A one-country record, a three-country life

The audience is almost entirely American. Box for Buddy, Box for Star by This is Lorelei opens at 20 on its first week. This is Lorelei is Nate Amos, a New York multi-instrumentalist who grew up in a Vermont bluegrass household, has quietly written over 150 songs across a decade, and is also the lead guitarist and producer of art-pop duo Water From Your Eyes. The Super Deluxe edition of his 2024 album arrived, and the geography tells the story. A one-country record at the threshold of a global chart.

Born in Saratov, trained in Jerusalem, now based in Berlin: Serge Geyzel has crossed enough borders that his sound was never going to sit still. The Way To Go enters at 19, about half the audience from Britain, the rest scattered across Ireland, Germany, and France. He works from analog synthesizers, drum machines, and field recordings he captures himself. A geographic profile that suggests word of mouth rather than a single event.

The holdovers

System 7 and Derrick May hold on at 18 with Flower of Life, 10 places down from last week’s 8. Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy drifted out of Canterbury prog band Gong through the acid-house clubs of the late 1980s, and have been recording as System 7 since 1989. The audience remains firmly British. A steep slide, but 2 weeks on the chart is more than most first weeks manage.

The man from Saturn, 33 years on

Sun Ra insisted he came from Saturn and never relented. The Arkestra lands at 17 with East Two + 7, a record from an artist who left the planet in 1993 but whose band has never stopped performing. His catalogue stretches across hundreds of albums and 4 decades. The costumes were ceremony. The performances were ritual. And the records keep turning up, 33 years after his death, the audience overwhelmingly American.

A Shostakovich concerto at Queen Elizabeth Hall at the age of 10: that is how Neil Cowley started. Then years touring with soul and funk acts before forming the Neil Cowley Trio in 2006, winning the BBC Jazz Award for Best Album the following year. Built on Bach sits at 16 with about two-thirds of the audience from Britain. The sound lives where jazz meets rock: hook-driven piano riffs that can pivot, without warning, into passages of startling quietness. After a 7-year solo detour into ambient and electronic territory, the trio reconvened in 2024. This is what followed.

The record that will not stay dead

2 weeks ago Mutually Assured Distraction by Younger Brother sat at number 1. It dropped off the chart entirely last week. Now it is back at 15. Simon Posford and Benji Vaughan, the producers behind Hallucinogen, Shpongle, and Prometheus, named their duo after a Kogi prophecy and traced an arc across 3 studio albums from pure electronic psytrance through full-band territory. About half the audience comes from the US, with pockets in Britain, Sweden, and Israel. A re-entry from the summit to the lower chart is an unusual path, but the record keeps finding new hands.

One person, every note

Ebony Pendant is Simon Coseboom, a Seattle multi-instrumentalist who writes, performs, and records every note himself. Raw production, shrieked vocals, and guitar work melodic enough to ache without softening the attack. Threnodies From The Coldlands opens at 14. The influences are Norwegian and Finnish. The execution is American. Nearly 9 out of 10 listeners are American, and a first-week placement this high for raw black metal says something about the week, or the audience, or both.

The holy father at number 13

Father Dionysios Tabakis is a 52-year-old Greek Orthodox priest who serves at the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, one of the oldest and most beautiful churches in a city renowned as a centre of Greek faith. He was born in Piraeus in 1972 to a family of Asia Minor descent. He records alone at home. He plays fretless electric guitar, the instrument he favours because its lack of frets lets him feel out the microtones closest to the human voice.

Paradise Metal enters at 13 on Athens’ Heat Crimes label. 150 copies pressed. The album bends Byzantine church modes through shoegaze drone, amplifier worship, and DIY electronics. He is trained in Byzantine music theory and plays qanun, oud, cumbush, tanbur, ney, zurna, clarinet, Politiki lyra, Pontic lyra, and kabak kemane. Boomkat, the UK’s most respected specialist record shop, described the record with the words reserved for things that arrive without precedent.

The geographic picture is the widest of any entry in the lower chart: America, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Austria, Australia, and 14 other countries. Sacred music on a worldwide independent chart, pressed in an edition smaller than a school assembly. Nothing else here sounds like it.

Last week’s number 1, settling

Last week, number 1. This week, 12. Mouth Ulcers and their Silent Pictures EP have settled 11 places after a week at the summit, but settling after a peak like that is context, not decline. The London quartet make post-punk that borrows from Joy Division, The Cure, and Bauhaus, rebuilt by players young enough that the 1980s are inherited rather than remembered. Britain leads the audience, with a small but persistent Japanese following that was not there last week.

2 weeks on the chart. A peak at the very top. The EP has done its work.

The man who co-founded Ableton Live, after hours

Robert Henke co-founded Ableton Live, the software that reshaped how a generation makes and performs electronic music. Under the name Monolake he has spent 3 decades building something more private: minimal, dub-inflected techno that trades in texture and spatial depth rather than spectacle. His creative practice extends into laser installations at the Tate Modern and the Barbican, custom instruments, and self-written algorithms.

Interstate takes 11 on its first week, with the most evenly balanced audience on the chart. Germany, America, and Britain each account for roughly equal shares. The music is just one surface of an unusually deep body of work.

Catholic scripture and tundra rock

7 out of 10 listeners are Spanish. El Altar Del Holocausto claim 10 with Ecos. The Salamanca-based instrumental quartet perform under pseudonyms: Skybite, Weasel Joe, Reverb Myles, Reaper Model. The sound layers aggressive post-rock against slow-burning doom; Catholic scripture titles the tracks and shapes the architecture. A home audience this concentrated, for music this heavy, at number 10 on its first week.

Bergen, Norway, and a band that decided the desert rock template needed adjusting for latitude. Slomosa call their sound tundra rock: grandiosity modelled on fjords and snowfields rather than any sun-baked American highway. Live in Bergen captures a sold-out hometown show at USF Verftet and sits at 9. Their 2020 self-titled record crossed 10 million streams. Tundra Rock won the Rock category at Spellemannprisen. Tours alongside Mastodon, Helmet, and Alkaline Trio followed. A live album in the top 10 says something specific about the energy in the room.

Arvo Part meets electric guitar

A.A. Williams is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist whose music folds post-rock weight into chamber-quiet arrangements. Equal parts cello, electric guitar, and a voice that carries both. Solstice takes 8 with about half the audience from Britain.

She made her first stage appearance in April 2019 and sold out her first headline show at the Southbank Centre within the year. The influences run from the classical minimalism of Arvo Part and Gorecki through the folk-inflected orchestral tradition of Vaughan Williams. A third full-length on Bella Union, and a first-week placement at 8 suggests the audience has been waiting for exactly this.

A 16-year-old from London, carried by America

He was 16 when his first album landed and the genre charts had to be renegotiated. TURQUOISEDEATH is a London producer who builds at the intersection of breakcore, drum and bass, shoegaze, and dream pop. Se Bueno drew in collaborators from the Korean underground, including Parannoul and Asian Glow, and turned a bedroom experiment into a 50-minute argument for the viability of the whole thing. 3 albums deep by 2025, with a cassette run that sold out before most listeners had heard the name. The audience is overwhelmingly American. His first record, re-released, finding the top 10 from a country an ocean away.

800 tapes in a New York apartment

Arthur Russell died of AIDS in 1992 at 40 years old. He left behind 800 tapes in his New York apartment and a reputation that scarcely existed in his lifetime. He had studied at the Ali Akbar Khan school in California, performed with Allen Ginsberg, co-founded Sleeping Bag Records, written a disco single under the name Dinosaur L that reportedly sold 200,000 copies, and once wrote a country song for Randy Travis. The artistic communities that loved him had almost nothing in common with each other: Philip Glass, John Cage, the Talking Heads, the pre-Studio 54 disco scene of David Mancuso’s Loft.

Love Is Overtaking Me (Redux) is a remastered reissue of the 2007 compilation of his folk, pop, and country songs, timed to what would have been his 75th birthday on May 21st. New masters from a recently found pristine tape reel. The legendary producer John Hammond, the man who signed Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen, recorded Russell on several of the sessions heard here. The audience is almost entirely American. An artist 34 years gone, still finding the audience he always believed he would reach.

Bristol, twice

5 entries remain, and this is where the week’s 2 surviving threads converge. Bristol appears twice in the top 5: once through Massive Attack, and once through Tricky, who co-produced the first single on Massive Attack’s debut Blue Lines before breaking away on his own. Between them sits a Pittsburgh vaporwave label, a London duo who met at a songwriting camp in Normandy, and a Scottish pre-order that has rewritten the upper chart entirely.

The protest song holds

Massive Attack’s first new music since 2020. Tom Waits’s first original recording since 2011. Boots on the Ground is a 7-minute protest song that sat at number 2 on its first week. Now it settles to 5, 3 places down, and the fact that it is still here after the avalanche of fresh entries says something about the weight of the thing. Waits’s son Casey contributes additional vocals. The vinyl profits go to the ACLU and the US Immigrant Defense Project.

A farm in Iowa, a chart in the world

Geometric Lullaby is not an artist. It is a vaporwave label that Dennis Mikula started from a farm in Buffalo Center, Iowa, because he wanted a single place to release all his own anonymous vaporwave aliases. The label name adds up to 27 in Pythagorean numerology, which Mikula considers important. Every cassette is packaged with tarot cards, Japanese-style OBI strips, and hand-selected stickers. Mikula’s other job is frontman of Ghost Bath, a depressive black metal band on Nuclear Blast Records. The Venn diagram of those 2 audiences is its own kind of art object.

The Flower Blooms in a Dream is the 6th entry in the label’s Collections series: a cassette box set of ambient slushwave by Virtual Dream Plaza, intended to be listened to alone, beginning at sunset. 190 releases deep, and number 4 is new territory entirely.

Same city, same origin story, 2 different charts

Bristol again. Adrian Thaws, known as Tricky, co-produced “Daydreaming,” the first single on Massive Attack’s debut Blue Lines, before breaking away to build a sound no one else has managed to replicate. Different When It’s Silent is his 15th studio album and the first under his own name in 6 years. His manager, Alan McGee, the man who founded Creation Records and signed Oasis, had to convince him the songs were a Tricky album and not another side project. Recorded between France and Bristol, the album runs through singer Mitch Sanders’ soulful falsetto and closes with a track featuring longtime collaborator Marta.

Massive Attack sits 2 places below. Same city, same origin story, 2 different paths on the same chart. The audience is the most evenly distributed on the board: Britain, America, France, Germany, Poland, and a long tail of 24 other countries. 31 years since Maxinquaye, and the language he built still belongs to him alone.

Normandy, a cello loop, and the number 2 spot

Phoebe Little and Jas Scott met at a songwriting camp in Normandy, working on somebody else’s project. On the first day, Jas put down a pizzicato cello loop she had been carrying around on a loop pedal, and a new band materialized before the song they were supposed to be writing ever did. SpaceAcre’s Life’s a Bitch Mixtape takes the 2nd position.

The London duo’s audience splits roughly in half between Britain and America. Co-signs from BBC Radio 1, BBC 6 Music, and The Independent. Longlist for the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition. Fiercely independent, firmly DIY, and operating with the kind of purposeful intensity that makes the album title sound less like a complaint and more like a mission statement. Number 2 on a week when the top spot belongs to an act that has sold records for longer than SpaceAcre has existed.

13 years of silence, and then the chart collapsed

13 years. That is the gap between Boards of Canada’s last album, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, and Inferno, announced this week on Warp Records for a May 29th release.

Brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin record from a bunker in the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh. The studio is called Hexagon Sun, after the collective of musicians, photographers, and filmmakers who gather there for outdoor parties they call Redmoon nights: bonfires lit at the ruins of a 16th-century monastery, old children’s songs mixed over steady electronic pulses, the crowd thinning from a hundred to fifty as the fire burned down, candles and lights carried inside the collapsing roof. The Hexagon Sun website, for years, displayed a single message in mirrored turquoise text. Reflected, it read: “the internet is evil. wake up.”

4 albums that redefined what home-listening electronic music could sound like. Then silence. 13 years of it.

The return began with cryptic VHS tapes mailed to fans and posters appearing in London, New York, California, and the Liquidroom in Shibuya. On April 16th, they uploaded “Tape 05” to YouTube: their first new music in over a decade, a dark ambient piece that traverses multiple moods, beginning with droning synthesizers and gradually incorporating harps, organs, and rising strings. Then the album announcement, and the pre-orders opened, and the chart collapsed under the weight.

Inferno is not yet released. It is a pre-order. And it has claimed number 1 with a margin so vast that the rest of the chart exists in a different arithmetic. The catalog number is WARP496, apparently at the duo’s own request, skipping ahead from the label’s current numbering. The album runs exactly 70 minutes, and 70 has carried meaning in their work for decades: Music70 is the name of their own label, “Sixtyten” reads out as 70, “The Smallest Weird Number” from Geogaddi directly references 70, the smallest weird number in mathematics.

America leads, with Britain a strong second. 18 tracks. The longest silence in their career, and the loudest return the chart has ever registered.

The week in full

16 new entries. 4 survivors, all further down. A Greek Orthodox priest playing microtonal guitar through amplifier worship at 13. Bristol’s 2 founding voices of trip-hop sharing the top 5. And at number 1, a pre-order for an album that does not yet exist, from an act that has not released music since 2013, with a margin that made the rest of the chart look like a footnote.

The full chart is here. It resets next week. Whether it can top this one is another question entirely.