On Getting In for the Eighth Time — Stray Kids' 'THIS & THAT'

A chart position is a number that's only good for one week. Next week it changes, and a few months from now nobody remembers it.

What gets remembered isn't the position but the count. You forget what number it hit; you keep how many times it got in. The first is about who else happened to be around that week, the second is a record that adds up.

This week's numbers

Item	Detail
Group	Stray Kids
Song · album	'THIS & THAT' (title track of the same name)
UK Official Singles Chart	No. 61
UK Official Albums Chart	No. 80
What it marks	Eighth entry on the UK singles chart

On the same week's charts, KATSEYE's 'Animal' sat at No. 16 on singles, and 'ICONIC BY MISTAKE', made together by LE SSERAFIM, ILLIT and KATSEYE, was at No. 93.

Eight times, as a phrase

No. 61 is a low number. It isn't the top 10, and it isn't the top 50 either.

But attach the words "eighth entry" and you start reading it differently. Getting in once can be chance; eight times isn't. It means a different song, at a different moment, landed on the same chart each time.

The UK Official Chart combines streaming with physical sales. Fandom firepower does register there, but for that firepower to repeat eight times the fandom has to hold. So what this number measures is less the popularity of this one song than the base underneath it.

Why the entry, not the ranking, becomes the news

News about a Korean group on an overseas chart often gets reported as the fact of entering rather than the position it entered at. That's less lazy reporting than a reflection of how the market is shaped.

The UK singles top 100 is mostly English-language mainstream music. A non-English-language song landing inside it is still uncommon. No. 61 may look low, but count how many non-English songs are sitting around it and the story changes.

That logic will run out someday, of course. Once entries become ordinary, an entry stops being news, and from then on only the ranking is left. Which is to say the stretch where "eighth time" still counts as news hasn't closed yet.

Try it like this today

Listen to the song first. Read the chart talk first and the song starts sounding like a report card. Flip the order and it's just a song.

Then look at the title. 'THIS & THAT' means exactly that, this and that, and it never says what it's pointing at. A title built from two demonstratives and nothing else.

A title that points without ever naming what it points to got onto the chart for the eighth time. This, and that. 'THIS & THAT'.