After nearly two years, SZA's 'SOS' rockets back to the top of the album chart

It's a colossal week for old music on this week's Billboard charts, as years- or decades-old holiday songs fill the Hot 100's top 16 spots — as well as 23 of the top 25. Mariah Carey closes in on an all-time record she's virtually certain to one day possess. The albums chart is similarly larded with ancient titles, with holiday crooners (including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and their no-good stepson, Michael Bublé) everywhere you turn in the top 10. Even the new No. 1 album is something of an oldie.

It's worth taking a moment to acknowledge just how drastically streaming has changed the chart landscape, particularly here at the end of December. Before Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" finally hit the top five in 2018 — remember, the song came out in 1994 — a grand total of one holiday song had achieved that feat in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, which dates back to 1958. (That track: "The Chipmunk Song" by The Chipmunks with David Seville, which hit No. 1 in December 1958.) To this day, only eight holiday songs have ever hit the Hot 100's top 5, a testament to both the recency of the holidays' chart dominance and the immovability of the tracks near the top of the chart.

This week, the top 16 songs are all holiday perennials. A year ago at this time, holiday songs filled the top eight slots — and that was a record at the time. Eight years ago this week, there were two holiday songs in the top 25: "All I Want for Christmas Is You" at No. 16 and Pentatonix's "Hallelujah" at No. 23. (Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" isn't really a holiday song, but Pentatonix released its cover on A Pentatonix Christmas, so we're counting it with an asterisk.) This week, there are just two non-holiday songs in the top 25: Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars' "Die With a Smile" at No. 17 and Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" at No. 24. (Look for those two titles to duke it out for No. 1 next week.)

The supremacy of "All I Want for Christmas Is You" — it's No. 1 for a fourth straight week, which gives it 18 weeks overall, gathered a few weeks at a time since it first topped the chart in 2019 — has it nicely positioned to break the all-time record for weeks at No. 1 in December 2025. "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" certainly has a bit of life left in it, but for now, it and Lil Nas X's 2019 song "Old Town Road (feat. Billy Ray Cyrus)" remain tied for the all-time record with 19 weeks. If "All I Want for Christmas Is You" hasn't topped the chart for at least two more weeks a year from now, that'll be a massive upset.

Rounding out the top 10: a great big moldering sack of oldies that have since been loaded into a giant chest freezer in the nation's garage, to be thawed out sometime around next Thanksgiving: Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" (holding at No. 2), Wham!'s "Last Christmas" (holding at No. 3), Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bell Rock" (holding at No. 4), Ariana Grande's "Santa Tell Me" (lords-a-leaping from No. 9 to No. 5), Burl Ives' "A Holly Jolly Christmas" (dipping from No. 5 to No. 6), Andy Williams' "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" (holding at No. 7), Dean Martin's "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" (holding at No. 8), Kelly Clarkson's "Underneath the Tree" (up from No. 10 to a new chart peak at No. 9) and Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)," which climbs from No. 14 to No. 10.

If you're looking for something worth noting in the preceding paragraph — besides the fact that someone out there wished on a monkey's paw that Andy Williams would never leave us — it's that "Santa Tell Me" is an official, fully vested member of the Christmas Canon. Ariana Grande's presence in Wicked surely helped, as did a physical release to celebrate the song's 10th anniversary. But when a decade-old track has the juice to surpass "A Holly Jolly Christmas" (much to the consternation of the unruly Ives Hive), it's not going anywhere for a loooooong time.

We owe SZA a great debt: Had she not surprise-released a deluxe edition of her colossal 2022 album SOS on Dec. 20, you'd currently be reading about Michael Bublé's bloodless blockbuster Christmas returning to No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Instead, you get to witness the triumph of a terrific — albeit supersized to the point of unwieldiness — edition of SOS, titled SOS Deluxe: LANA.

SOS was a chart powerhouse even before its expansion: It debuted atop the Billboard 200 near the end of 2022 before wrapping up a run of 10 weeks atop the chart in early 2023. Individual songs were similarly successful, with five of them hitting the top 10 and "Snooze" sticking around on the Hot 100 for the entirety of 2023. Yet SZA has only seemed to gain momentum since SOS's release; just last week, she was still in the top 10 with her featured performance in "Luther," a highlight of Kendrick Lamar's new album GNX. (If it weren't for holiday songs, that track would still reside at No. 3 on the Hot 100.)

SOS has never left the top 20 since its release, which adds up to more than two years of chart relevance for the album, which began its life as a 23-song epic. Now that SOS's deluxe edition sports a whopping 38 songs — with reports suggesting that more tracks will be added shortly — a fresh round of streaming activity has sent the album roaring back to No. 1.

Adding to its initial run at the top of the charts in late 2022 and early 2023, this is SOS's 11th nonconsecutive week at No. 1. No album in the history of the Billboard 200 — which dates back to 1956 — has ever posted a longer gap between stints at No. 1. Of course, this particular flavor of flex, where artists release "deluxe editions" of already-successful albums with piles of bonus tracks, is a relatively new phenomenon. (So is streaming itself, in the grand scheme of things.)

Still, Billboard did a bit of math and determined, based largely on streaming, that those 15 new tracks — had they been released as a free-standing album — would have hit No. 1 on their own. Regardless, SZA has blocked Michael Bublé and other holiday titans from getting a clear shot at the top spot. Bublé's Christmas rises from No. 5 to No. 2, while Bing Crosby's supersized 2024 compilation Ultimate Christmas jumps from No. 6 to No. 3. (That's Crosby's highest chart position since 1959.) Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song matches its own chart peak, as it leaps from No. 11 to No. 4.

Lamar's GNX tumbles from No. 2 to No. 5, Mariah Carey's Merry Christmas jumps from No. 10 to No. 6 as listeners discover it contains more than just one song, Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department slides from No. 3 to No. 7, the Wicked soundtrack slips from No. 7 to No. 8, the classic girl-group compilation A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector leaps from No. 16 to No. 9 and Frank Sinatra's Ultimate Christmas climbs from No. 17 to No. 10. Next week, look for all but SZA, Kendrick, Taylor and Wicked to get crammed into the Christmas crawl space until late November.

As noted above, the streaming era has radically transformed the Billboard charts, while also giving us a clearer-than-ever sense of which songs have graduated into the Christmas-music canon. (Hope you like 'em old-fashioned, cheerful and unambiguous!) It's become possible to predict, with a fair bit of certainty, which songs will hit the top five every holiday season, and in what order, with only minor fluctuations from week to week. But when you look over the charts from the end of each year, you do start to get a sense of which songs are rising — and fading.

Just last week, two relatively recent-vintage songs — Ariana Grande's 2014 track "Santa Tell Me" and Kelly Clarkson's "Underneath the Tree," from 2013 — hit the top 10 for the very first time. There's ample evidence that those songs have year-over-year momentum, given that they'd spent recent holiday seasons hovering between No. 11 and No. 20. Similarly, it's easy to spot gradual (if seemingly glacial) chart growth for Wham!'s "Last Christmas," which peaked at No. 9 in 2020, No. 5 in 2022 and No. 3 this year. And yes, sigh, Michael Bublé is also creeping up on us: His 2011 cover of "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas" hit No. 12 this past week, surpassing its previous peak of No. 19.

But charts also represent simple math, and in order for songs to rise, others must fall. Bublé's momentum seems to have helped diminish, however slightly, Perry Como's 1951 version of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, which has charted as high as No. 12 but topped out at No. 16 this year. (It must be tough for Como to compete with Bublé, given that the latter's entire elevator pitch seems to consist of the words, "Perry Como, but alive.")

Other old-as-dirt holiday songs have been on downward trajectories in recent years. José Feliciano's 1970 chestnut "Feliz Navidad" has been a mainstay in the top 10 during several different streaming-era Decembers, but topped out at No. 11 this year. Gene Autry & The Pinafores' 1949 rendition of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" peaked at No. 16 in 2020, No. 28 in 2022 and No. 30 this season — each time surpassed by an ever-greater number of holiday hits.

Looking over the final Holiday 100 chart of the 2024-25 season, you get a clear sense of the current canon, in order — and you can see where once-dominant songs have drifted further and further from present-day holiday playlists. In recent years, popular discourse surrounding Band Aid's 1984 hit "Do They Know It's Christmas?" has highlighted the charity song's condescension, as well as its misunderstanding of how widely Christianity (and snow) has proliferated in Africa. As a likely result, the song has become something of a chart afterthought, stalling out at No. 52 on The Holiday 100 this week.

Others fade for reasons that are harder to discern. There's great affection out there — at least in some circles — for Bruce Springsteen's vein-bursting rendition of "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town." But the song, which has risen as high as No. 16 on Billboard's Holiday 100 in previous years, is languishing at No. 49 this week. Similarly, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's much-jammed "Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)" has resided on the Holiday 100 for all 73 weeks of its existence, and has charted as high as No. 4, but currently sits at No. 46.

There's considerably less affection out there for Elmo & Patsy's 1979 novelty song "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer," which routinely hit No. 1 on Billboard's Christmas Hits chart — a predecessor to The Holiday 100 — in the '80s and peaked at No. 87 on the Hot 100 in a pre-streaming era that greatly de-emphasized holiday songs. The track hasn't sniffed the Holiday 100 in years.

For those of us who've lived through that song's '80s omnipresence, that has to count as a pretty sizable blessing.

After nearly two years, SZA's 'SOS' rockets back to the top of the album chart

After nearly two years, SZA's 'SOS' rockets back to the top of the album chart

After nearly two years, SZA's 'SOS' rockets back to the top of the album chart

After nearly two years, SZA's 'SOS' rockets back to the top of the album chart

After nearly two years, SZA's 'SOS' rockets back to the top of the album chart