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MUNA’s ‘Dancing on the Wall’ Tops This Week’s New Music Poll
MUNA’s Dancing on the Wall topped Billboard’s weekly new music poll, ahead of Charli xcx, J Balvin, Lykke Li and more.
MUNA’s Dancing on the Wall has landed at No. 1 in Billboard’s weekly best new music poll, beating out one of the week’s most closely watched releases: Charli xcx’s “Rock Music.”
The poll, published Friday, May 8, gave the Los Angeles indie-pop trio the top spot after listeners picked their third studio album as the week’s standout release. It was a crowded field, too. Alongside MUNA and Charli xcx were new albums from J Balvin and Ryan Castro, Lykke Li, Little Simz and The Chainsmokers, plus fresh singles from The Last Dinner Party, PJ Morton, Ashley McBryde and others.
MUNA
Dean Bradshaw/Courtesy MUNA
For Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin, the result lands as a meaningful marker. Dancing on the Wall arrives on Saddest Factory Records and follows their 2022 self-titled album, the record that widened their audience and pushed them into a more visible mainstream lane, helped in part by the Phoebe Bridgers collaboration “Silk Chiffon.” That earlier album also brought a wave of critical praise, and this new one suggests the trio are not simply repeating the formula that worked before.
Instead, Dancing on the Wall leans further into the band’s familiar mix of openhearted indie-pop and big emotional release, with the title track standing out as one of the year’s more immediate dance tracks. The band has always worked best when those instincts collide, and the new album feels like an extension of that approach rather than a reset.
Charli xcx’s “Rock Music,” by contrast, came in second and signaled a more obvious turn away from the Brat-era sound that powered her 2024 commercial breakthrough. In April, she told British Vogue that making yet another dance-leaning record would have felt emotionally draining. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she said. “What’s interesting for me is to bend the possibilities of what my perspective on that could be.” The single arrives ahead of a new album that has not yet been announced.
See the final results of this week’s poll below.
