At No. 1 on the albums chart: country star Megan Moroney, who debuts on top with Cloud 9. At No. 1 on the singles chart: an even more newly minted country star in Ella Langley, whose "Choosin' Texas" returns to the top spot after a week away. It's a big week for women in country music — and, it turns out, for women whose songs are favored by women in figure skating.
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On the Billboard charts, as in life, not all milestones are created equal. Still, something happened this week that has never happened before: This is the first time women known primarily for country music have topped the Hot 100 singles chart and the Billboard 200 albums chart at the same time.
On the Billboard 200, Megan Moroney lands her first-ever No. 1 album with Cloud 9. Buoyed, Taylor Swift-style, by a plethora of Target exclusives — with multiple different editions available for sale on vinyl and CD — Cloud 9 moved a whopping 78,000 copies, while also scoring enough online listeners to land her at No. 2 on the streaming chart. It's a big jump for the singer, whose previous album (2024's Am I Okay?) peaked at No. 9.
On the Hot 100, Ella Langley returns to No. 1 with her durable smash "Choosin' Texas." In the process, she displaces a former country singer in Swift, whose "Opalite" crashed the top spot last week due to a flood of physical copies sold via the singer's website. But Swift slips to No. 4 this time around, ceding chart real estate to not only Langley, but also two of the biggest hits of the past year: Olivia Dean's "Man I Need," which climbs to No. 2, and… Alex Warren's tragically unkillable "Ordinary" at No. 3.
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Megan Moroney displaces Bad Bunny's DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, but it's also a big week for a pair of artists who haven't visited the top 10 in quite a few years.
Debuting at No. 3, the artist immortalized a quarter-century ago with a star turn as Lizzie McGuire debuts with her first album in more than a decade. Titled luck… or something, the new record gives Hilary Duff her highest-charting record since 2007, thanks in part to a boost via a Walmart-exclusive edition. (With Moroney's chart boom accompanying a huge assist from Target, who says big-box stores aren't what they used to be?)
Mumford & Sons last hit the top 10 in 2018, with the chart-topping Delta, but the folk-rock group's long-awaited follow-up released last year (Rushmere) peaked at No. 19. Still, a new album called Prizefighter fares noticeably better, chart-wise, debuting on this week's Billboard 200 at No. 10.
There's one other top 10 debut this week, as rapper Baby Keem — cousin and frequent collaborator of one Kendrick Lamar — scores his highest-charting album to date as Ca$ino debuts at No. 4. (Read more about the album here.) Unlike the albums by Duff and Mumford & Sons, the bulk of Ca$ino's numbers were driven by streaming rather than sales, which is good news for its future chart prospects.
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Beyond the rise of Ella Langley and the fall (however temporary) of Taylor Swift, there isn't much to report in the top 10 of this week's Hot 100. Bad Bunny's many hits are starting to slide as his Super Bowl halftime show fades from the rear-view mirror, but that's to be expected.
Still, there's one other sports-adjacent chart success worth noting this week.
One of the biggest breakout stars of this year's Winter Olympics was U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu, who won gold in the women's singles event — and did so with a combination of athleticism, artistry, flair and great hair. Shortly after winning, Liu participated in the noncompetitive Olympic figure-skating gala, where she performed a show-stopping and widely seen routine to PinkPantheress' "Stateside (feat. Zara Larsson)," a remix of a song from last year's Fancy That. In fact, Liu even wore an outfit inspired by PinkPantheress' dress from the song's video.
This week, PinkPantheress and Larsson take a huge leap up the charts, as "Stateside" bounds from No. 41 to No. 13, while Fancy That jumps more than 100 spots to No. 57 on this week's Billboard 200. The song's rise just happens to coincide with Liu's "Stateside" skate — a sign, if one was needed, that there's more than one way to transform a song from a sleeper to a full-fledged smash.
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