Week in Review June 22–28, 2026
← Last week’s review (June 15–21)
What a week. The calendar said early summer and the music world acted like it — a flood of brand-new singles from some of the biggest names on the planet, two record-breaking album debuts on both sides of the Atlantic, and the loss of one of the most important figures the record business ever produced. Here’s the music that mattered the week of June 22–28, 2026.
This Week on Music Videos Club
It was one of our busiest weeks yet, with brand-new releases landing almost daily alongside a run of deep-catalog rebuilds. Here are the highlights.
The Rolling Stones – Jealous Lover (2026) — The Stones returned with their first new single in three years, a preview of the album Foreign Tongues due July 10. Mick Jagger dusts off the soul falsetto he made famous on “Emotional Rescue,” Steve Winwood guests on keys channeling the late Nicky Hopkins, and the Anya Taylor-Joy–starring video turns jealousy into a full-blown motel brawl. Most moving of all: the album features the late Charlie Watts, captured in a session shortly before his death.
Katy Perry – Watch It Burn (2026) — One of the most-demanded unreleased songs in Perry’s catalog finally arrived. Hidden as an Easter egg inside her “Bandaids” video for over a year, “Watch It Burn” is its darker, angrier sister track — a cathartic, scorched-earth turn from the queen of pop spectacle, complete with a video in which she torches a city and transforms into a scorpion.
Kenny Chesney – Silver Sands Marina (2026) — Chesney thought the lakeside marina in his new song was invented — it was too perfectly drawn to be real. It isn’t, so he traveled to the actual New Hampshire spot on Lake Winnipesaukee to film the video. It’s the reflective title track of his 21st album, his first on his own Hey Now Records.
Benson Boone – The Time of My Life (2026) — Boone marked his own 24th birthday by releasing what he calls the favorite thing he’s ever made — a slow-building heartbreak ballad that opens in a whisper and explodes into his signature Wall of Sound, with a theatrical video starring Alix Earle.
INNA – Morenito (2026) — The Romanian dance star — the first European woman ever to reach a billion YouTube views — switched entirely to Spanish for her bid to own the summer, a sun-soaked Latin dance track built for the season.
Paul McCartney – Coming Up (1980) — A rebuild with perfect timing: the version of “Coming Up” that hit No. 1 in America on June 28, 1980, wasn’t the album version at all, but a live Wings B-side that radio flipped to without McCartney even knowing his label was pushing it. It’s also the song that got John Lennon recording again.
The Rolling Stones – Start Me Up (1981) — One of rock’s great accidents, rebuilt: the Stones’ biggest hit of the 1980s was a forgotten burst of rock buried inside dozens of failed reggae takes — a recording nobody in the band even remembered making until a producer dug it out of the vault.
Ariana Grande – no tears left to cry (2018) — Grande asked for a song that began like a ballad and exploded into joy, turning the hardest moment of her life into the best pop single of 2018. Watch for the hidden Manchester bee in the video’s final seconds.
And there was plenty more. We rebuilt Alice Cooper – School’s Out (1972) — his attempt to bottle the greatest three minutes of childhood — and dug into I’m Eighteen, the song a failing band tricked radio into playing. We covered Gretchen Wilson – Here for the Party, complete with her brand-new CMA Fest duet with Ella Langley; Cheap Trick – The Flame, the only No. 1 the band hated; Lita Ford – Kiss Me Deadly, the signature song she didn’t write; Three Dog Night – An Old Fashioned Love Song, a Carpenters reject that became a top-5 hit; Procol Harum – Conquistador, the overlooked album track a symphony orchestra turned into a smash; and Tavares – It Only Takes a Minute, the 1975 original behind Take That’s breakthrough.
This Week’s No. 1s
Billboard Hot 100 (US): Taylor Swift holds a second week at No. 1 with “I Knew It, I Knew You,” her single from the Toy Story 5 soundtrack — her 15th career chart-topper, the most of any artist this century. See the full chart →
Official Singles Chart (UK): Sam Fender and Olivia Dean reign with their duet “Rein Me In.” See the full chart →
Billboard 200 & UK Albums (the week’s biggest story): Olivia Rodrigo tops the album charts in both countries with her third record, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. Its 485,000-unit debut was the biggest week of her career and the largest for any solo artist in 2026 — and made her three-for-three, with every one of her albums entering at No. 1. See the full chart →
Music News This Week
Olivia Rodrigo makes chart history. Beyond the raw numbers, Rodrigo’s third straight No. 1 debut places her in rare company — a perfect album-chart record three releases deep, at just 23. For an artist who arrived in 2021 with “drivers license,” the consistency is the headline: no sophomore slump, no third-album wobble, just three blockbusters in a row. Read more at Billboard →
Myles Smith scores the UK’s biggest debut album of 2026. The Luton singer-songwriter — a former BRITs Rising Star winner — entered the Official Albums Chart at No. 2 with My Mess, My Heart, My Life., the biggest opening week for any debut album this year, held off the top only by Rodrigo. It caps a meteoric rise for an artist who broke through with “Stargazing,” the biggest UK single by a British act in 2024. Read more at Official Charts →
Take That break an Amazon Music record. The veteran British trio — whose own career began, fittingly, with a cover of Tavares’ “It Only Takes a Minute,” which we covered this week — notched a new streaming milestone on the platform, proof that the appetite for their brand of pop endures three decades on. Read more at Official Charts →
Brandon Flowers announces his first solo album in 11 years. The Killers frontman is stepping back out on his own for the first time since 2015’s The Desired Effect, a notable move from one of the defining rock voices of the 2000s. Read more at Official Charts →
Snow Patrol and Kylie Minogue team up. An unexpected and intriguing pairing: the Northern Irish rock band and the Australian pop icon have joined forces on a new single, bridging two very different corners of the pop world. Read more at Official Charts →
This Week’s Birthdays
An exceptional birthday cluster fell this week — and remarkably, three of the artists celebrating had brand-new MVC coverage land in the same days.
June 25 — Benson Boone (born 2002) released his new single “The Time of My Life” on his own 24th birthday. Read more →
June 25 — George Michael (1963–2016) and Harold Melvin (1939–1997) share the date — two extraordinary voices we remember warmly.
June 26 — Ariana Grande (born 1993) and Gretchen Wilson (born 1973) share a birthday across genres — pop’s reigning vocalist and country’s redneck woman, both with fresh MVC features this week. Ariana → · Gretchen →
In Memoriam
Clive Davis (April 4, 1932 – June 22, 2026)
The music world lost one of its true titans this week. Clive Davis, who died at his Manhattan home at the age of 94, was arguably the most influential record executive in the history of popular music — a man with what the industry simply called “the magic ear.” Across a 60-year career steering Columbia, Arista, and J Records, he signed or shaped an astonishing roll call of artists, including many whose songs fill this very site: Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Janis Joplin, Santana, Earth, Wind & Fire, Aretha Franklin, Barry Manilow, Whitney Houston, and Alicia Keys among them. As president of Columbia Records in the era of Paul McCartney’s “Coming Up,” which we rebuilt this week, his fingerprints are all over the catalog MVC covers. Springsteen, whom Davis signed as an unknown 22-year-old, remembered him simply as a great record man and close friend. A funeral service is planned in New York on June 29. His impact on the music we love is almost impossible to overstate. Read more at Variety →
Until Next Week
That’s the week of June 22–28 — a heavy one, in every sense. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with us. We’ll see you next Sunday with another round of the music that mattered.