Brand New
Mrs. GREEN APPLE
By the TrendSongs editorial team, using country-level Apple Music charts. Our methodology
Released less than a week ago, Brand New lands directly at the top of the Japanese chart. So far, nothing extraordinary for Mrs. GREEN APPLE, the most popular melodic rock trio in the archipelago. What is more remarkable is second place in the same ranking, held by Lilac, their track released in 2024. Two uninterrupted years on the charts, and now a one-two at the summit, the kind of performance you observe practically nowhere but Japan. That longevity is the band's signature, but also their market's. Japanese audiences are famous for extreme loyalty, sustained by anime openings, television appearances and a singles culture that never really surrendered to playlist logic. A song that catches on can stay charted for years, where elsewhere it would have vanished within two months. The Japanese chart is by far the most singular of our 33 countries. Nearly impervious to the Anglo-Saxon hits dominating everywhere else, it runs as an almost closed ecosystem, J-rock, J-pop and idol groups sharing the summits while global stars sit thirty places lower. Week after week, when we compare rankings, Japan is consistently the country whose top 100 resembles the others' the least. You can read it as a market closed onto itself, or on the contrary as proof that a strong local industry can thrive without bowing to global standards. Both readings hold. Meanwhile, Mrs. GREEN APPLE reigns over the planet's second largest music market, and if their name means nothing to you, that is precisely the demonstration of the phenomenon. A hundred million Japanese listeners do not need our validation to know what they love. One cross-reference with the rest of these pages sharpens the point. Among the global releases covered here, Gracie Abrams' album charts in 32 of our 33 countries with an average rank of 4.6, Olivia Rodrigo's in 32 as well, and the Shakira and Burna Boy collaboration Dai Dai in 27. All three reach nearly everywhere. Japan is the market where they land, when they land at all, far below the summit Mrs. GREEN APPLE occupies. Dai Dai does appear in the Japanese chart, but its worldwide average rank of 19.6 tells you what kind of position that is. A domestic act holding the top two places against that competition is not a quirk of taste, it is a structural feature of the second largest music market on earth, and the one our comparisons flag most often as an outlier.
