These three artists are poised to invade the top of the pop charts

VPM | By Stephen Thompson

Published July 10, 2026 at 2:03 PM EDT

Stella Lefty began releasing music in 2024. Her song "Boston," built around a melody borrowed from Noah Kahan's "Stick Season," has been rising on the charts.

For yet another week, the top of the pop charts feel familiar — country star Ella Langley holds at No. 1 with “Choosin’ Texas,” while the K-pop boy band ATEEZ lands atop the albums chart yet again. But if you look just outside the top 10 on this week’s Hot 100, a few intriguing songs seem poised to crash the chart’s uppermost reaches.

TOP STORY

The year’s biggest hit, “Choosin’ Texas,” has held the Billboard Hot 100’s top spot for 12 nonconsecutive weeks. Every time a new sensation debuts at No. 1, “Choosin’ Texas” waits in the wings, ready to pounce. But a few titles just below the top 10 suggest the imminent arrival of a few rising stars with room to grow.

* At No. 13, Stella Lefty’s country-pop sleeper “Boston” hits a new peak this week. The song feels simple enough, with a hook lifted from the Noah Kahan hit “Stick Season” — Kahan even gets a songwriting credit — but the song is a bright, summery mood-lifter in its own right. And, as Langley has shown, word-of-mouth country hits have a way of sticking around.

* At No. 19, the rapper Yung Miami scores the highest-charting hit of her career, with her viral hit “Spend Dat.” Yung Miami has been floating around and charting for years, both solo and as half of the duo City Girls, and she’s collaborated on a chart single with Latto and Lola Young, called “Don’t Play With It,” which hit No. 69 in 2023. No. 69 is nice and all, but “Spend Dat” has already proven to be Yung Miami’s biggest hit by a mile — it’s her first solo song to hit the top 40, let alone the top 20.

* And at No. 22, the singer, songwriter and TikTok phenomenon Malcolm Todd hits a fresh career peak of his own, with a song from 2024 titled “Earrings.” Todd has been a chart mainstay for a few years now — his new album, Do That Again, recently debuted in the top five — but “Earrings” is his biggest hit yet.

There’s still time this summer for Stella Lefty, Yung Miami, Malcolm Todd and others to crash the top 10. If they really want to dream big, “Choosin’ Texas” can’t stay at No. 1 forever.

TOP ALBUMS

For the past two weeks, Olivia Rodrigo has sat comfortably atop the Billboard 200 albums chart with her latest record, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. It’s already one of 2026’s biggest hits, and would have easily held on at No. 1 for a third week, were it not for the K-pop boy band ATEEZ.

For those who aren’t familiar, ATEEZ ranks among K-pop’s kings of quantity: In just four years, the group has landed nine records in the top 10 — including the five-song EP Golden Hour : Part.4, which hit No. 3 back in February. Now, the group is back with Golden Hour : Part.5, which debuts at No. 1.

Golden Hour : Part.5 sold 223,000 copies in its first week — a number that absolutely dwarfs its week-one streaming numbers — thanks in part to 30 different editions on CD and five different editions on vinyl. Because sales don’t usually carry over from week to week, it’s likely to be a short-timer where the charts are concerned.

Still, the new record gives the group bragging rights, and pop-music enthusiasts a new bit of trivia: ATEEZ is now the group with the most titles to chart in the top 10 during the 2020s so far. Given the prolificacy and popularity of the acts it’s just surpassed (namely Stray Kids and Tomorrow x Together), that is no easy feat.

As with last week, when the entire top 10 sat motionless compared to the week before, there isn’t much action worth noting immediately below ATEEZ: Rodrigo slides to No. 2, Ella Langley’s Dandelion waits in the wings at No. 3. But for this week, Golden Hour : Part.5 is your chart champ. It won’t be No. 1 for long, but you won’t likely have to wait long for another new ATEEZ title, either.

TOP SONGS

The Hot 100 may look as if in the midst of the summer doldrums, as little changes from last week. But tell that to Ella Langley, who’s been 2026’s biggest breakout star by a mile. This week, she once again posts three songs in this week’s top 10: “Choosin’ Texas” at No. 1, “Be Her” at No. 3 and “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” her Morgan Wallen duet, at No. 6.

Each summer, Billboard assembles a limited-term “Songs of the Summer” chart, and “Choosin’ Texas” has been the mainstay atop 2026’s entries; the song is virtually guaranteed to run away with the all-around title this year, much the way Alex Warren‘s “Ordinary” did in 2025.

Langley’s toughest competition, Taylor Swift‘s “I Knew It, I Knew You” — which Swift wrote for Pixar’s Toy Story 5 — holds at No. 2 for a second week after two weeks atop the Hot 100. It’s easy to imagine the two songs swapping places in the coming weeks, especially if Swift’s recent wedding gives her a chart bump.

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Stephen Thompson

Stephen Thompson is a host, writer and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist and guest host on All Songs Considered. Thompson also co-hosts the daily NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created with NPR's Linda Holmes in 2010. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)

In 1993, Thompson founded The Onion's entertainment section, The A.V. Club, which he edited — alongside duties as The Onion's copy editor — until December 2004. In the years since, he has provided music- and pop-culture-themed commentaries for NPR programs such as Weekend Edition, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, on which he earned the distinction of becoming the first member of the NPR Music staff ever to sing on an NPR newsmagazine. (Later, the magic of AutoTune transformed him from a 12th-rate David Archuleta into a fourth-rate Cher.) Thompson's entertainment writing has also run in Paste magazine, The Washington Post and The London Guardian.

During his tenure at The Onion, Thompson edited the 2002 book The Tenacity Of The Cockroach: Conversations With Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders (Crown) and copy-edited six best-selling comedy books. While there, he also coached The Onion's softball team to a sizzling 21-42 record, and was once outscored 72-0 in a span of 10 innings. Later in life, Thompson redeemed himself by teaming up with the small gaggle of fleet-footed twentysomethings who won the 2008 NPR Relay Race, a triumph he documents in a hard-hitting essay for the book This Is NPR: The First Forty Years (Chronicle).

A 1994 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Thompson now lives in Silver Spring, Md., with his girlfriend, their three cats and a room full of vintage arcade machines. (He also has two adult children who've headed off to college but still call once in a while.) Thompson's hobbies include watching reality television without shame, eating Pringles until his hand has involuntarily twisted itself into a gnarled claw, using the size of his Twitter following to assess his self-worth, touting the immutable moral superiority of the Green Bay Packers (who returned the favor by making a 22-minute documentary about his life) and maintaining a fierce rivalry with all Midwestern states other than Wisconsin.

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