What was the first song about drugs to hit number one in the charts

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Which artist has had the most number one albums in a single year?

Tue 3 March 2026 13:00, UK

Whatever happened to giving an artist the grace of time?

It seems as though this never-ending content treadmill, on which we all exist in the modern world, demands artists to deliver record after record, without any time to exist with the previous one. Many factors contribute to this insatiable appetite for more within modern pop culture, and the first would undoubtedly be our rapidly shrinking attention spans, which are seemingly incapable of enjoying a long-form project without speculating what might happen in a sequel or worse, without interrupting it with short-form video snippets.

Then there is the finance, where, as a commodity, art has never been cheaper for the consumer, and so, for artists to fairly see their bottom line increase, they must tirelessly toil away at the grindstone, just to create a life where their own art sustains a living. This attitude towards artistic output seems to contradict the styles I find so appealing, ones that revolve around an artist giving space for a record to breathe and subsequently stirring a feeling of necessary anticipation for the next one, which allows for an interesting sonic shift and evolution that may not happen in such quick succession from the previous release.

But maybe this outlook is nonsense, because the musicians I herald as pioneers of this innovation seem to contradict my own ramblings, such as David Bowie, The Beatles and Bob Dylan, all of whom pivoted their sound through albums released within a year, sometimes months of one another.

The question is whether our appetite for more is a completely modern trope, or has it always been secretly harboured within us, demanding musicians to feed the beast or become irrelevant altogether, while the answer to the artist with the most number one albums in a single year seems to confirm it is the latter.

So, who has the most number one albums in a single year?

Having set myself up to provide an answer that exists within the history books of music, you would be forgiven for thinking it exists within the aforementioned names, but it actually comes from a rival artist in 1967, who somehow managed to cut through their dominance a whopping four times.

In the year when The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Magical Mystery Tour, The Jimi Hendrix Experience released Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, and The Doors released their self-titled debut, along with Strange Days, it was The Monkees who topped the album charts the most with their self-titled The Monkees, More of The Monkees, Headquarters, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd, to break a joint record of three held by Elvis Presley, The Kingston Trio, The Beatles and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass.

The previous year, The Fab Four achieved the feat with Rubber Soul, beginning the year at number one, before it was joined by the compilation Yesterday and Today, and the experimental masterpiece Revolver.