Mega Monday: Taylor Swift's 'Patient Zero' Dethrones a 24-Week Record, and Four of Her Songs Flood the Top Five
Taylor Swift's 'The Encore' places four new songs in the Hot 100's top five, ending Ella Langley's outright-record 24-week run at No. 1 -- and bumping last week's own No. 1 and No. 4 clean out of the top 10 in the process.
By Song Reviews · October 12, 2026
What Mega Monday Is
Every Monday, Song Reviews takes the previous week’s Billboard Hot 100 top 10 and asks the one question a chart position can’t answer on its own: is the popularity deserved? Most weeks that question has a clean answer. This week it has two different ones, because two different stories are stacked on top of each other in the same top five.
This Week’s Chart
The Hot 100, week of October 10, 2026:
| # | Song | Artist | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Patient Zero | Taylor Swift | 5.8/10 – debuts at No. 1, Swift’s 16th chart-topper and tenth No. 1 debut, tying Drake’s record. |
| 2 | Choosin’ Texas | Ella Langley | Falls to No. 2 after reclaiming the top spot for one additional week, closing an outright-record 24 weeks at No. 1. Already given the full Feature Friday treatment, not re-reviewed here. |
| 3 | Cleveland! | Taylor Swift | 5.5/10 – debuts at No. 3. |
| 4 | Babylon | Taylor Swift | 6.4/10 – debuts at No. 4, the best of the four new entries. |
| 5 | Pink Clouding | Taylor Swift | 6.0/10 – debuts at No. 5. |
| 6 | Boston | Stella Lefty | 8.0/10 – climbs from No. 6 to No. 6, the top 10’s best-reviewed holdover. |
| 7 | Been by Now | Morgan Wallen | 7.3/10 – falls from No. 7 to No. 7. |
| 8 | Hate That I Made You Love Me | Ariana Grande | 6.0/10 – falls from No. 9 to No. 8. |
| 9 | stupid song | Olivia Rodrigo | 7.4/10 – re-enters the top 10 at No. 9, up four spots, four months after its original release. |
| 10 | Dracula | Tame Impala & JENNIE | 6.4/10 – falls from No. 7 to No. 10. |
Is the Popularity Deserved?
No, mostly not – and the chart itself makes the case better than this column could. Four songs from one album’s deluxe rollout occupying positions one, three, four and five is a real achievement in the aggregate (more on that Friday), but graded individually, three of the four are merely competent: “Patient Zero” restates its own premise without complicating it, “Cleveland!” sells a hook its lyric doesn’t back up, and only “Babylon” earns its position on craft rather than name recognition alone. The four songs’ combined opening numbers were large enough to seat all four in the top five regardless of individual quality, which is exactly the mechanism that pushed last week’s No. 1 (“Man I Need,” still the best-reviewed song to pass through this column since Mega Monday started) and No. 4 (“So Easy (To Fall in Love)”) completely out of the top 10 this week – not because either got worse, but because four simultaneous new entries from one name only had to out-rank them once.
The record that ended deserves the fuller sentence. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” didn’t just set the longest non-holiday No. 1 run in Hot 100 history back in September – it kept adding to that total afterward, reclaiming the top spot for one additional week after this column already covered it falling to No. 2, bringing its final tally to 24 weeks at No. 1, outright, ahead of every record this column has tracked this year. It’s still at No. 2 now, nine months after its release, which is a longer competitive life than almost anything else that’s passed through this chart in 2026.
The rest of the top 10 is this week’s actual good news. Stella Lefty’s “Boston” is still the best-reviewed song in the top 10 by a wide margin, and Olivia Rodrigo’s “stupid song” climbing back to No. 9 four months after it first charted – on no news hook this column could independently confirm, just a song that keeps finding new listeners – is the kind of slow-burn chart story that’s easy to miss under a deluxe-album flood. Measured against the four songs that just arrived with a built-in audience behind them, “stupid song” earned its return the hard way. Only one of this week’s five new or returning top-10 songs can say that.
Hero image: Taylor Swift performing, 2019, by Glenn Francis, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.