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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 11/01/2025 (Doechii, Mufasa: The Lion King, Lil Baby/Young Thug/Future)

For a seventh week, Gracie Abrams’ surprisingly consistent “That’s So True” lands at the top of the UK Singles Chart. The mind boggles, but otherwise it’s an average winter week so welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, discussion of sex and therapy

Rundown

Of course, as we’re back to normal on the charts, we actually do start our episode with the notable dropouts, those being songs that exit the UK Top 75 – which is what I cover, check the FAQ – after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid adieu to some heavy-hitters like “Guess” by Charli xcx featuring Billie Eilish on the remix, “BACKBONE” by Chase & Status and Stormzy, “Cruel Summer” by Taylor Swift, but also “365” by Charli xcx, “Indestructible” by Andy C and Becky Hill, and obviously the very small selection of Christmas songs that held on – you know the ones.

As for what takes their place, we have a few re-entries, firstly a residual gain for Morgan Wallen – more on his new track later – as “Love Somebody” returns to #74, then “Slow it Down” by Benson Boone bumbling back onto the billboards at #72, “squabble up” by Kendrick Lamar at #71, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan peculiarly propelling as high as #22, then thanks to some TikTok virality, the classic story of an older song gaining memetic status and coming back to the charts, a trend 2024 continued that won’t be leaving us anytime soon. This week, it happens to be a former #1, “La La La” by Naughty Boy featuring Sam Smith at #33. A fine song to my ears but nothing too remarkable, it debuted at the top and stayed there for only a week in 2013, but spent many a week on the chart that year and the next anyway, and now it’s back but hopefully not for too long.

In terms of our notable gains, we see plenty of boosts for SZA with “30 for 30” with Kendrick Lamar at #68 and “BMF” at #20 off of the debuts (more on her later as well), as well as Tyler, the Creator with “Sticky” featuring GloRilla, Sexyy Red and Lil Wayne at #57 and “Like Him” featuring Lola Young at #30. Additionally jumping up the charts are “Favourite” by Fontaines D.C. at #65, “Headlock” by Imogen Heap at #44, “Indigo” by Sam Barber featuring Avery Anna at #41, and finally, “PUSH 2 START” by Tyla at #24. This is the week where we really get to see what’s shaping up to be big hits during the winter, and I’m not sure if there’s much to complain about here at all, honestly.

This week’s top five consists of “Who” by Jimin up big to #5, “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez at #4, “Messy” by Lola Young at #3, “APT.” by ROSÉ and Bruno Mars at #2 and of course, Ms. Abrams at the very top. Now, we get to see what our first normal week on the UK chart for 2025 has in store for us.

New Entries

#75 – “Scorsese Baby Daddy” – SZA

Produced by Michael Uzowuru, Tyler Johnson,

Well, naturally, a third song from SZA’s disappointing sequel-turned-reissue LANA has debuted, and I won’t reiterate my more in-depth opinions of the project as a whole from last week, with this being a pretty run-of-the-mill leftover like most of it. The link to acclaimed film director and Shark Tale star Martin Scorsese is not too deep, it’s little more than simply a word used here to describe the drama of her relationship – I’m not too familiar with his films, so there could be subtle parallels I miss but this is a SZA B-side, she’s never been that cryptic as a writer either. The bedroom pop guitars feel oddly dry on this one considering that this is one of those tracks I was talking about when I said that SZA sounds underwater; the vocal mix is legitimately horrendous. I’m not an expert but, come on, she’s really unclear and difficult to make out when she’s not doing incredibly obvious punch-ins that sound like distorted phone recordings. Despite this watery sound, she’s still breathy and loud, overwhelming a very stock indie pop instrumental that should not have taken this many producers. It’s inoffensive, especially in the content and the vaguely pleasant “vibe”, though much of that is disturbed by the uninteresting and shoddy vocal take being so amplified and unavoidable, it’s really frustrating.

#69 – “No One Noticed” – The Marías

Produced by Josh Conway and Gianiuca Buccellati

This is technically one of those cases where I can say that I was “a fan before they were cool”, except not really. Years before California indie pop group The Marías had their breakout with this sleeper hit and its connected album, Submarine, I took the time to check out the group’s 2021 album and thought very little about it. There were a few tracks I liked from this debut and I could tell their Latin- and jazz-influenced brand of indie pop was something smoother and different compared to what was coming out at the time, but I had no idea or suspicion that they would be as big as they currently are, the success they’re enjoying coming as a surprise to me as I’d forgotten about that album entirely, just one of the many non-mainstream records I listened to that year and wouldn’t expect to start a considerable chart run anytime soon.

With that said, “No One Noticed” has been doing well globally since last year, especially in North America, and it's finally found itself in the top 75 in the UK this week. Undoubtedly, much of the appeal of this song is in atmosphere and “vibes”, with this song’s light guitars and weightless drums, as well as an airy vocal from lead singer Maria Zardoya, curating an aquatic track not far from the album’s cover art, it really fits. Lyrically, there is actually little to the song, quite literally in terms of how repetitive it can feel, particularly with that mantra of a bridge, but the spiralling loneliness that this exacerbates just hit pretty effectively when the song functions as much as a drone as that feeling can. There are even moments of swell in the post-chorus that go nowhere once the verse comes back in, with glimmers of hope reverting into a disappointing normality. The allusions to a long-distance relationship also help this song situate itself in between denial and acceptance, with the overlapping vocal takes panning across in that wonderful build-up, leaving “without a trace” as the lyrics entail, then barely cropping back up as a murmur amidst a completer mix, being a subtly suffocating structural idea, it’s really brilliant. The song at just below four minutes is full in itself, but unlike most pop songs with “extended versions” that seem like cheap excuses to release chopped-up TikTok bait as the original or add a pointless intro, this has a nearly five-minute version in both English and Zardoya’s native Spanish that add to the circling progression of the track, with the additional outro verse being filtered amidst the song’s closing trail of ambiance. It could seem unnecessary or tedious, but that’s what her devotion to this relationship has turned into, and it stings. It’s definitely not the kind of song I’d typically hope to get big, but it seems like a running theme of this year may be that I adore slow ballads popping up from lesser-known artists more and more… or at least I hope it’s a running theme, these are great songs.

#52 – “Smile” – Morgan Wallen

Produced by Charlie Handsome

Morgan Wallen releases yet another loose single that will end up featuring on the next 30-song album he puts out, it’s a familiar tale, and I’m somewhat impressed by how he and his fanbase have mastered an exceedingly lengthy rollout in the streaming era. The songs I tend to be much less impressed with, however, though as long as he sticks to his familiar country and doesn’t do another embarrassing crossover like his last single “Love Somebody”, it should be inoffensive enough. Given Mr. Handsome is on production, that does not seem probable, though in this case, it’s not awful – those harmonies in the main vocal loop, especially when they end up pitch-shifted later on, remind me of Bon Iver and Justin Vernon’s frailer, minimal touches, and Morgan Wallen actually commits to the subtlety here… as much as he can, at least! The lack of drums and the reverbed, echoing mix with twangy guitars, Wallen’s softer falsetto in the chorus, it all captures the idea of “pretty little moments” that he finds with his partner amidst a struggling period in their relationship, and discovering genuine solace in the fact that at least he saw her smile, regardless of why she did so, whether it was real, it just makes him happy. He knows the relationship has gotten to a stale numbness that he doesn’t excite her, but seeing her have fun at the bar doesn’t jolt energy into Mr. Wallen here, it just means he can smile back. For once in his career, it appears that Morgan Wallen of all people has chosen mature acceptance of a relationship’s imperfections as the way to go. It’s an empty, temporal song that took quite a bit of a risk in its production by stripping so many elements but once again, the slow ballad wins me over. It’s the little things in life, and one of them is being pleasantly surprised by a Morgan Wallen and Charlie Handsome song. Hey, it’s a sweet track, leave me alone.

#48 – “Constellations” – Jade LeMac

Produced by Jason “JVP” Van Poederooyen

A debut single from an artist relatively unknown prior debuting at #48 would be more of a shock if this weren’t originally released back in 2021. This is the official debut of Vancouver singer-songwriter Jade LeMac, part of the crop of young, TikTok-famous songwriters in the wake of Olivia Rodrigo that will have a viral breakout hit, it just happens that this came over four years late, at least onto the mainstream charts. LeMac provided vocals on Monstercat dance tracks when she was only 14, so she has been active in the industry for longer than you might expect, though that does not necessarily mean her debut single will chalk up to much, especially in 2025, now that she’s two full-length albums in, and none of those records have made much noise – it’d irritate me if I was an artist actively promoting new music. This should especially bother Ms. LeMac over here, whose 2021 single charting in 2025 sounds like snap-beat, murky alt-pop from 2017, with a typical vocal you’d expect from that era, perhaps with better enunciation but much less character, it’s not even got the smoky rasp texture of, say, a Lorde, which is a big issue for me because this is a sex song, a drunk sex song at that. There should be more intimacy, but if we want to go for one of those drearier, miserable alt-R&B sex songs, there should be either more in the lyrics to aim for that or less of a Eurovision sheen to the production. The lyrics emphasise alcohol and constant physical touch, so why does this sound so cold and packaged? If she’s going to sing about the smell of her partner’s body after they left, I would expect the song to at least try and sound that gross and sweaty, but no, it sounds like Daya. Do you remember Daya? We don’t need to remember Daya. Skip this.

#46 – “Dum, Dumb, and Dumber” – Lil Baby, Young Thug and Future

Produced by Wheezy and Juke Wong

You don’t say. Well, Young Thug’s returned from his stint in jail thanks to a heavily negotiated deal that brings more asterisks than a censored transcription of his lyrics to the technically true statement “Young Thug is free”. Similarly, Lil Baby has returned from his hiatus, and by hiatus, I mean that he’s been consistently dropping mediocre singles that have not moved the needle in any regard and a full album release with big name features – Travis Scott and GloRilla are also on this record, to name a few – has successfully made people pay a bit more attention, even if the “comeback” has served similarly middling results to everything he’s shovelled out since My Turn. In fact, this newest record – WHAM – has landed at #12 on the albums chart despite being his most questionable release yet. Hell, I’ll go as far as to say that this is slop he could have pushed out with little effort or time, and the framing of a comeback is carrying its performance heavily, alongside star power and some Gunna sneak diss on the bonus tracks. There’s nothing in WHAM you can’t get anywhere else in trap and usually a lot better, with these cheap, thrown-together beats and some of the thinnest, stilted vocals in mainstream rap, he’s really lost whatever flow or grit he had for the vast majority of the runtime. Thankfully, this song is sort of an exception.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not close to being good – sure, there’s an anthemic beat that could be made out of those crushed, sirening synths and crowd-igniting intensity in the loops, but given it’s a Wheezy beat, the bass and percussion drowns out a lot and becomes a tad monotonous of a loop. Similarly, Young Thug comes with some first-days-out energy but the flow is very simple and so constant throughout all the rappers – I get going for the theme, but it is exhausting when all three went for the same inflection, and you can actually track in real-time the flow improving as we get “dum, dumb and dumber” – allegedly, because in reality, the progression from Lil Baby’s sloppy mumbling to Young Thug showing more restraint than you’d expect to Future running away with the track because this production sounds made for him and his MIXTAPE PLUTO project… I think we may actually be getting smarter and more confident as it goes on, which does help this not become as mind-numbing as, say, “Type Shit” with Future, Playboi Carti and Travis Scott, though the lyrical content is about as substanceless. Also, Lil Baby is supposed to be saying the name of his album, but it does just sound like he is going “wah”, like an actual little baby. Don’t call it a comeback, he’s been trash for years.

#42 – “I Always Wanted a Brother” – Braelyn Rankins, Theo Somolu, Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr.

Produced by Mark Mancina and Lin-Manuel Miranda

I was completely out of the loop on this release, but Disney has been – with surprising success at being completely avoidable – shovelling out even more charmless live-action or photorealistic CGI versions of their animated classics, that have been increasingly a non-presence since they started in the 2010s. This is actually from a successor to their 2019 version of The Lion King that I heard, well, nothing but bitching about, and in the case of 2024’s Mustafa: The Lion King, I missed even the mudslinging, what Wikipedia and Metacritic will call “mixed reviews”. It’s commercially successful enough regardless, and we have a new song from the cast, interestingly none of the big names starring like Beyoncé or Donald Glover on this one, debuting on the charts. I’ve said many a time on this blog that I’m personally not the biggest Disney fan outside of the Muppets, but The Lion King in its original 1994 animated version is pretty undeniable, already full of catchy and culturally-ingrained musical numbers like “Hakuna Matata” and “I Just Can’t Wait to be King”. This is not that. It is written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which means it’s dead on arrival, and at least does commit to some of the conceits of the original soundtrack, the group vocals remind me of those classic songs, but I’m sorry, I’m completely not on board with the basic writing that fall into predictable clichés, the child actors’ cloying deliveries and the display through the instrumental still being slightly Latin-flavoured that Mr. Miranda is quite limited in these types of introductory songs. I can’t even say that I’m missing narrative context here because if I were to watch the film, the meaning of this one is drilled so much into the ground that I’d be lamenting the lack of a “skip entire scene” feature like DVDs used to have. If the clips of this film’s generic-looking lions are reflective of the overall quality, then this song may be the least soulless thing about it – you can tell the actors are sometimes trying and having at least some degree of fun with it – but also, it prompts me to imagine this coming out of those photorealistic lion mouths and that’s frankly hilarious. It’s fruitless asking Disney to try harder so I’ll conclude by saying that this won’t become a thing outside of brief virality and I’m thankful it won’t. If Mufasa ends up a massive cultural phenomenon, then I’m Nostradamus and also, I quit this show.

#39 – “DENIAL IS A RIVER” – Doechii

Produced by IanJames, Joey Hamhock and Banser

Speaking of being out of the loop, I still have not caught up to Doechii and her big mixtape last year, Alligator Bites Never Heal, which has crept up on the public over the months since its release thanks to several performances going viral on social media like the NFR Tiny Desk set and now a music video parodying old sitcoms with several special guest stars from her label TDE and outside of it – ScHoolboy Q, Teezo Touchdown, even rapper-comedian and all-time Tweeter Zack Fox, all make appearances. That may have been the last boost this song needed to rocket all the way up to the top 40 and finally force me to pay more attention past the pop single “What it Is (Block Boy)” a while back and some features I thought were energetic yet never fully convinced me to dive into her body of work. It may not go that far but it does intrigue me because for a second top 40 hit, this is surprisingly dense.

“DENIAL IS A RIVER” eschews a chorus in exchange for skits wherein Doechii talks to a therapist and tracks her life to catch them – and the listener – up with her life, expressing her theatrical sense of humour in the process and acting as a pretty great introduction = or reintroduction – to Doechii as a result thanks to the song explicitly being about self-exploration, some verses acting as a bit of a confessional and trauma dump towards the end where she discusses her drug addiction. Even then, the escalation of the content is relatively lighthearted, with the goofy therapist voice, perky East Coast boom bap beat, and how the first verse is a mundane verse about her ex being gay. Honestly, the song is much more conceptually than it works in practice, as Doechii I find is actually lacking in wordplay that’s lasting or effective, with what should be wham lines coming off as deflated, especially considering the lack of development in that instrumental. It’s a shame because there is a lot to this that I appreciate, but the actual execution of those ideas lacks in selling them – sure, she picks up the aggression in her voice towards the end of the final verse to show her feeling “loopy” but it’s still straightforward and honest lyrically with unimpressive punchlines, and the beat refuses to reflect that spiral by changing at all. The outro where her breathing exercise sounds like a Slick Rick beatbox solo is an incredible idea, and I wish the song gave more time and effort to genuinely adventurous and experimental ideas like that. It may lose some authenticity in doing so but theatricality is already so prominent in this song that it wouldn’t make for much of a difference tonally. It is still surprisingly dense and inaccessible for her second hit in comparison to the pop songs surrounding it, yet it’s not enough to interest me when I can think of ways in which this can be expanded on to great effect, with a guy like Tyler, the Creator who she’s worked with, or even SZA at her most unhinged too, being examples of where to look for that in popular rap and R&B. Basically, she’s already committed to the bit so hard, let’s go even further next time.

Conclusion

Best of the Week nearly went to Morgan Wallen, what has come over me? Seriously, he gets the Honourable Mention for “Smile” but The Marías pretty handedly take the best with “No One Noticed”, both slower reflections in a week full of, frankly, disposable shit excluding those and Doechii. That means Worst of the Week goes to Simba the lion or whoever the fuck, with a Dishonourable Mention to “Constellations” by Jade LeMac. The SZA and Lil Baby songs mostly get away with just being lazy, not outright bad. Let’s hope for better weeks for the rest of 2025, but for now, thank you for reading, hakuna matata, and I’ll see you next time!

#pop music #song review #uk singles chart #sza #doechii #mufasa the lion king #braelyn rankins #theo somolu #aaron pierre #kelvin harrison jr.#morgan wallen #the marías #jade lemac #lil baby #young thug #future

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