Welcome to the Christmas season

Taylor Swift reclaims the #1 spot with The Tortured Poets Department, while the first of the Christmas albums start to climb up the ARIA Albums Chart.

The album jumps from #14 last week thanks to the release of vinyl and CD versions of The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. It is the album’s sixth non-consecutive week on top and its first week at the summit since early July. Taylor has now been at #1 on the albums chart this year for 16 weeks with four different albums: 1989 (Taylor’s Version), Midnights, Lover and The Tortured Poets Department. 

Perennial yuletide chart-topper, Michael Buble’s Christmas, returns at #15. Released in November 2011, it hit the top for five weeks in 2011-12. The Canadian crooner’s festive season staple has been back at #1 a further five times, giving it a grand total of 15 weeks at the summit. 

Juice WRLD debuts at #17 with The Party Never Ends. It’s the third posthumous release and the fourth Top 10 album from the US rapper, who died in December 2019 aged 21. He reached #8 in 2019 with Death Race For Love, #1 in 2020 with Legends Never Die and #7 in 2021 with Fighting Demons. The Party Never Ends contains guest appearances by The Kid LAROI, Fall Out Boy, Nicki Minaj, Offset, Benny Blanco and Eminem. 

And, it’s that time: Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas re-enters at #100. It peaked here at #2 when it was released in 1994, re-entered the top 10 albums chart in 2018 and 2019, and has sold 18 million copies worldwide. How far will it climb this year? 

On the Singles Chart, it’s five non-consecutive weeks at #1 for Rosé and Bruno Mars’ APT. Last month Bruno broke the all-time record for monthly listeners on Spotify, topping 126 million and beating the previous record, set by The Weeknd, of 120.7 million. With Spotify’s total monthly active user figure now standing at 640 million, his music was listened to by just over a fifth of the service’s entire global user base. 

The Christmas songs also start rushing back onto the singles chart: Mariah Carey’s former #1 All I Want From Christmas Is You re-enters at #7 and Wham’s Last Christmas returns at #11, while holiday tracks by Brenda Lee, Ariana Grande, Bobby Helms, Michael Buble, Kelly Clarkson and Andy Williams* jingle their way back into the top 50. 

Mariah’s All I Want For Christmas Is You peaked at #2 when it was released in 1994. It first hit #1 in 2018 and has returned to the top spot every Christmas since then for a total of eight weeks so far. 

Wham’s Last Christmas stopped at #3 in 1984, returned to the top 50 in 1997 and disappeared again until 2016. It matched its #3 peak in 2019, hit #2 in 2020 and again in 2021, got to #3 in 2022 and #3 again in 2023.