Karol G - Bichota Records / Interscope
Here’s what actually mattered to our ears this week: a change at the top in the UK, an old Japanese hit resurrected by a boat-race dance, and an esports anthem carried by two voices from rock and metal. Variety is the order of the day, from Latin charts to Korean boy bands, by way of an Irish band’s comeback and a Japanese duo already well established internationally.
As always, we deliberately avoided leaning on a single chart: the nine tracks below were cross-checked across several sources, from official sales figures to the most viral trends of the moment, to capture both what currently dominates and what is only just starting to rise.
BbY WOW — Karol G, Judeline & rusowsky
The week’s biggest record keeps dominating Latin platforms: a pairing between the Colombian superstar and two emerging Spanish voices, somewhere between reggaeton and experimental pop. Judeline and rusowsky embody a new Iberian generation blending flamenco, trap and electronics — Karol G reached for them instead of settling for an easy Anglo-American feature.
REDRED — CORTIS
The HYBE-launched boy band turned this track into the soundtrack of the summer, to the point that TikTok crowned it “Song of the Summer” at its mid-year awards. Proof that the company behind BTS can also build a boy band engineered from the ground up for export and dance-trend algorithms.
Otonoke — Creepy Nuts
The theme song for anime “Dandadan” keeps writing history: the duo became the first Japanese act to earn RIAA Gold certification for two separate songs, this one and “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born”. Over 250 million combined streams abroad later, Japanese hip-hop is clearly exporting well beyond the archipelago, riding the wave of anime themes that become standalone hits.
Yoru no Odoriko — Sakanaction
A 2012 track resurrected by a viral dance born from footage of a traditional Indonesian boat race, set to the song by a Korean user in early 2026. The band’s own frontman posted his take on the choreography, pushing the track back to the top of streaming charts fourteen years after release — proof a hit can be reborn at any moment online.
Great Expectation — Sienna Spiro
The young Briton tops the UK’s official singles chart this week, just ahead of Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas”. A breakthrough for an artist previously associated more with the indie circuit and Live Lounge sessions, now topping a mainstream, genre-agnostic chart.
Marianne — Fontaines D.C.
The lead single from “Dopamine Chamber”, the Irish band’s fifth album due October 16 and produced by James Ford. The record promises to capture our endless news-feed scroll — the rise of AI, political violence, climate anxiety — and the band kick off their biggest indoor tour yet five days after release, on October 21 in Lisbon.
Crash Out — Tinashe
The second single from “Popstar”, her eighth album released September 25, following lead single “Too Easy” in June. The track confirms the ground the American singer has gained in R&B and dance over the past two years, between viral hit “Nasty” and the dance-chart-topping “No Broke Boys”.
Te Estoy Correteando — LATIN MAFIA & Fred again..
The pairing of the Mexican trio with the British producer, released in late July, keeps climbing Latin charts weeks after its release. An entirely Spanish-language track proving the bridges between Anglo-American electronic music and Mexican pop have rarely been so porous, with Fred again.. continuing to roam well outside his usual lane.
If The Sun Burns Out Tonight — Oli Sykes, Courtney LaPlante & Grabbitz
The official anthem of Valorant Champions 2026, currently under way in Shanghai through October 18, pairs Bring Me The Horizon’s frontman with Spiritbox’s singer, produced by Grabbitz for his fourth collaboration with the game. Further proof that mainstream rock and metal now feel right at home in esports, which has become a music commissioner in its own right.
Once again, a week that proves you should never trust a single chart, or a single language: it is by crossing scenes and generations that you get a real sense of what matters right now. From K-pop engineered for export to a fourteen-year-old Japanese slow burn, by way of an anthem built for esports, the line between “mainstream” and hyper-specialised niches has rarely looked thinner.
What stands out most this week is how little any of these tracks resemble one another: a reggaeton duet steeped in Spanish alternative pop, a factory-built Korean boy band, a Japanese rap duo exporting an anime theme worldwide, a fourteen-year-old song revived by a dance craze, and a metal-adjacent anthem commissioned by a video game publisher. None of that would have made sense in the same weekly round-up a decade ago — it says plenty about how genre boundaries keep dissolving under the pressure of streaming and short-form video.
