As summertime gets into full swing, the charts of the country’s most popular songs and albums are still being dominated by two very familiar names: Post Malone and Taylor Swift. Given that summertime is usually ruled by individual (and often ephemeral) bangers rather thanfull albums, we might be seeing a full Swiftie season ahead on the albums chart. The Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, on the other hand, is less steady, especially in recent years, when we’ve seen the meteoric rise of newbies’ hits springing out of social media (“Rich Men North of Richmond,” anyone?), so that’s where we might see more movement in the weeks to come.

TOP SONGS

Most of this week’s top five on Billboard’s Hot 100 looks remarkably like last week’s: Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” featuring Morgan Wallen is at No. 1 for the third week in a row, trailed by Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” and Shaboozey’s “Tipsy (A Bar Song).”

There’s one newcomer among their ranks: former Disney star-turned-singer Sabrina Carpenter, whose disco-inflected pop confection “Espresso” climbed one spot from No. 6 to No. 5. And right behind her, there’s still another indication that 2024 will indeed be the Summer of Country: Zach Bryan’s weeper “Pink Skies” makes its chart debut at No. 6.

This week also marks the annual return of (yet) another Billboard chart: Songs of the Summer, which the magazine introduced in 2010. This chart looks at songs’ cumulative performance throughout the summer (which Billboard begins with this week’s chart and ends the week of Labor Day). This early in the season, this chart is a snooze — all 20 positions are an exact replica of the top 20 spaces on the Billboard 100 chart — but it will be worth keeping an eye on in the months to come.

TOP ALBUMS

In news that is most likely a surprise to no one, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department is spending a sixth week in the No. 1 slot on the Billboard 200 albums chart. What may be slightly more startling information: following a bump after she released many deluxe and special issues of Tortured Poets, Swift is starting to experience a downturn in sales and streaming — and she’s not the only one.

Last week, Swift moved (to borrow a reviled music industry term) 378,000 equivalent album units (I promise, that’s the end of the jargon — at least for now). This week, she only had 175,000 units, per Luminate, the company that compiles the data that make up the Billboard charts. That’s a nearly 54% drop in just seven days — and many psychic worlds away from the first week of Tortured Poets, when Swift earned 2.61 million equivalent album sales a mere month and a half ago.

But Swift may not the only artist starting to sing the summertime blues. Although Bilie Eilish’s album Hit Me Hard and Soft is right behind Swift in the No. 2 spot for a second week in a row, she too has experienced a big drop with 145,000 units, down from last week’s 339,000 — which was a career high for Eilish.

While we’re not at the doldrums of the early 2010s, this is a trend to watch.

WORTH NOTING

One of the not-so-hidden industry secrets of the Billboard 200 chart is that generally, a rather bountiful proportion of its membership is comprised of so-called “catalog” titles: albums that have been commercially available for at least 18 months and sometimes for far, far longer than that.

This week’s chart is a textbook case in point: By my cursory estimate, about 57% of this week’s entries are deep catalog titles, with even more just approaching the 18-month mark. For example, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which was originally released in 1977, is currently at No. 31, having now racked up 583 weeks on this chart; the Bob Marley & the Wailers’ perennially beloved greatest hits collection, Legend (issued in 1984), sits at No. 35, 837 weeks strong and counting. Other nearly eternally charting artists include Journey, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eminem, Bruno Mars and Guns N’ Roses.

All that is a reminder of just how hard it can be for current — and especially emerging — stars to break through all those longtime favorites, even at the more modest chart positions. If anyone is going to challenge Taylor Swift’s hegemony on the Billboard 200 this summer, perhaps it will be one of these elders.

I will be the first to admit I didn’t even know there was a French shark movie until I saw it appear at the very top of Netflix’s top 10 movies. And it’s not as if it’s hiding anything about its topic: It’s called Under Paris. You know why? Because it’s all about sharks under Paris. Specifically, it’s about sharks in the Seine. Initially, there are just a couple of sharks. But then, there are a lot of sharks. And the movie is apparently an enormous hit, although/because it is, while not as silly as Sharknado, very silly.

Under Paris (aka, to me at least, Sharknadeau) begins as a standard menacing-creature story. Sophia (Bérénice Bejo, Oscar nominee for The Artist) is a scientist studying sharks in the vicinity of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (a real, depressing thing). She and her team get a signal from one of their tagged sharks, named Lilith, and several members of the team go on a dive to obtain a blood sample. This dive does not go well (I mean, I suppose it goes OK for Lilith), leaving Sophia traumatized.

A few years later, a shark-saving group in Paris alerts Sophia that they know where Lilith is: in the Seine. Now, sharks in the Seine are not a real thing, but perhaps the only upside of climate change is the expansion of options for disaster movies. After all, a movie like this can throw its hands in the air and say, “Honestly, you don’t know what’s possible now that you can go to the beach on Christmas, do you?” So: sharks in the Seine. Not just that, but multiplying sharks in the Seine.

Bérénice Bejo stars as Sophia, a shark scientist.

Sofie Gheysens/Netflix

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Sofie Gheysens/Netflix

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Of course, Paris has an arrogant, careless mayor who, like all government officials in shark movies, suffers from a pathological failure to be adequately afraid of sharks. She has only one priority: making sure that the upcoming triathlon goes off without a hitch. That’s right: The Seine is infested with ravenous sharks at the very moment when crowds of swimmers are about to throw themselves into the Seine at a highly public event. Mon dieu! Now, if it were you or me, perhaps we think to ourselves, “Better to cancel the event in advance than have it canceled on account of all the swimmers being devoured,” but no, the mayor of Paris has no such caution.

For the first half or so, Under Paris unfolds like a fairly classy suspense film about a rarely seen threat. It does not look cheap in the way Sharknado did, for instance. It’s quite competently shot and edited, it’s tense, and it’s frightening. In other words, it gets the job done.

In the second half, the movie goes fully bazoo. Certain arguments about the sharks’ intentions are resolved when some participants in those arguments are eaten. You get your first of a couple of overhead shots of a shark leaping out of the water, mouth first, the better to show you someone in its jaws (heh) who is thinking, “This seems bad.” Crowds run in terror. Blood gushes. If you are watching the movie in the original French (which I recommend) and you have the English subtitles on, you will see a lot of the caption “[panicked screams].”

All this to say: It’s not hard to understand why this is such a hot property at the moment. It gives you half of a fairly normal movie and half of an absolutely wacky one. About half of it is suspense, and about half of it is full-on creature horror, incredibly bloody and with a very (very) high body count. And at the end, there’s no question that just as these sharks are under Paris, the next ones will be under London (or New York, or wherever). If you’re looking for a popcorn movie and you don’t mind a lot of cartoonish gore, you could do a lot worse.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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