Wud Records: October 2026 top ten published at SoundCloud

The October 2026 Chart

The top ten tracks for October 2026 from Wud Records have been published in a new compilation at SoundCloud.

We shall elaborate further below with regard to each platform where our music is represented.

Bandcamp Is Still the Best Platform for Artists

If you are not yet a member of Bandcamp, we strongly suggest you sign up, whether you are an indie label, a musician or a fan of music, or all three. Do it now! It’s free to join. Just click here. :)

For any independent artist or label wanting to sell music or merch, there is no better place on the web to do so. If you don’t believe us, check out any search engine to see what other artists have to say about what the best site is for independent artists and labels. Bandcamp are simply Numero Uno.

When you subscribe to a music streaming platform, you don’t actually *own* any of the music. You’re just renting a bit of bandwidth on their distribution service, and most of the rent revenue you are paying for it goes to big corporations rather than the artists you love. It’s a terrible business model, both for artists and fans alike.

Consider also this. There is always a danger that streaming services might remove music or artists from their platform (e.g. the recent dispute between Universal Music Group and TikTok), or the platform may even cease to exist altogether. Remember VitaminIC, MySpace, FriendsReunited?

To avoid having the soundtracks to your life erased, we strongly recommend buying physical media and downloads so you can listen to your favourite songs whenever you wish. You know it makes sense!

Whilst several music platforms offer music downloads, they all charge a lot more and take a much bigger percentage of that higher price then Bandcamp does.

This means that you pay more, the band receives a lot less, and a big greedy corporation takes a big old chunk of the money you paid to support the artist all for itself, just because it can. It’s a lose-lose situation, unless you happen to be a big greedy corporation who can rip people off however the fancy takes them.

Buying music from Bandcamp will cost you less and support the artist more. About 80% to 85% of what you spend at Bandcamp goes directly to the artist or their label, and is paid daily.

So it’s always a good idea to download from Bandcamp whenever possible, as they are the best site for supporting artists. For us, one download of a €9 album is worth about 4500 snotify streams.

You can even pay more than the asking price for music on Bandcamp if you wish to add a little extra support for the artist. Again, this goes to the artists themselves, not some greedy anonymous megacorporation who only care for money, not the music you love.

There is also a rather fabulous Community feature at Bandcamp. You can join ours by clicking here.

SoundCloud

Just as we were enjoying the best month we ever had on SoundCloud last summer, our account was unexpectedly deleted by mistake. The account was subsequently restored, but was still badly damaged. It took until mid-October for it to be properly repaired.

In the meantime, there was not a single word from SoundCloud themselves regarding what they were doing to repair our account. This was the catalyst for a number of the changes that are happening. Our trust in SoundCloud as a place to keep our music was shattered.

Neither do we fully trust the information we get from SoundCloud and its slowly improving Insights system. However, there has been enough improvement in data quality in recent months for it to be useful again.

Shitify

We removed all of our music from the mean green snot machine a few months ago. We highly recommend you do the same, if you have any there. We also highly recommend that you cancel your subscription, and move your playlists (and so on) to a more ethical streaming service. Every other streaming platform is more ethical than snotify.

We don’t say this lightly. Nor do we say so from a position of ignorance. There are many very good reasons to remove all your music from spotify and to cancel your sub. Do it now!

For more information, please refer to this article:
https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/miscellaneous/boycott-spotify/

Tidal, Coda, YouTube, Amazon, Deezer, Apple Music, iTunes, etc.

We use data from our distributors Globex, Soundrop and CD Baby for information regarding streams on platforms such as Coda, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer and so on when reckoning the monthly charts.

Data from the streaming services filters through to us via our distributors, and we are not very trusting of it. At best we can get a general feel of what has been going on across all of the streaming services this way. Because the data arrives several days, or even weeks, late, we only use it to extrapolate general trends. Although, to be fair, it has been reasonably good so far in 2026.

HearThis, Audius, Audiomack

We have started organising our music at HearThis since the recent debacle with SoundCloud. Their stats have improved a lot recently and are now somewhat easier to collate.

October 2026 was also a very good month for us at HearThis, although we only have a few artists with music uploaded. Our recent successes there are making adding more music to HearThis higher priority among all the things we need to do. More on this soon.

The aforementioned debacle with SoundCloud was the catalyst for ourselves taking the decision to also begin adding our music to both Audius and Audiomack. Both platforms came highly recommended, although their stats, are also not especially informative. Activity on both platforms has been low and we may yet abandon them, although we have had very little time to dedicate to them.

Thanks For All Your Help!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during October 2026 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and elsewhere.

All the wonderful fans of our bands who supported us with downloads from Bandcamp are especially appreciated. Just one download of an album was worth a couple of months of snotify streams before we left that platform entirely. By buying a download, you genuinely help us keep the fires burning, and collectively we thank you for that most graciously. May you be blessed by the gods of rock n roll! :)

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on X (formerly Twitter) and BlueSky who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes our endeavours here feel worthwhile.

Thank you very much to everyone who bought items from our merch store. Anyone who shares a photo of themselves with their Wud item on social media will receive an extra goody from ourselves once we have seen it and shared the photo on to our community as well.

If you buy something cool from the Flicker merch store, or the Dark Company merch store, we shall also send you an extra goody if you show us a photo of yourself (or friend, or environment) on social media with the item you purchased.

Last and by no means least, we would like to say thank you very much to all of the splendid people who have been buying us coffees at BuyMeACoffee. It’s very kind of you to help us out. All of these things absolutely contribute to ourselves being able to keep going, and spend more time making beautiful music for you to enjoy. It is truly appreciated very much indeed.

How Did We Calculate The October 2026 Chart?

The algorithm we use gives greater weight to downloads, then comments and reposts and likes (active engagement), then plays (passive engagement). Different platforms perform differently and are given different weightings based on standard deviation calculations.

We use general tendencies and trends that have occured over the last calender month, as well as specifics where they are available. The data has been amalgamated together from all of the different platforms to make the new Top Ten. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are ignored, as is anything from people who clearly didn’t listen to the music.

If somebody actually pays to download something, they must have liked it! Our artists and ourselves are always very grateful to our supporters in this respect. It genuinely helps keep the fires burning and the wheels turning.

When somebody reposts a track, that gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help for creative souls. It enables that track to be discovered and enjoyed by the community of the person doing the sharing, which can generate new fans.

A ‘like’ is nice, but reposts actually helps the artist reach a bigger audience. You create the chance for that to happen. Recommending a song costs you nothing at all and can be a massive help for an independent artist. Why not do it now? :)

Only you, the listener, can influence our next chart. So if there is a song you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it, share it to your social media feeds! Download it from our Bandcamp! Add it to a playlist! It absolutely can make a difference.

Who’s In The October 2026 Top Ten?

The latest top ten features three different acts, and four if you consider The Bastard Sons of Dennis and BSoD + D² to be two separate acts.

There is one song from Dark Company, six from The Bastard Sons of Dennis (including one from BSoD + D²), and three from the Band of Georges.

This month we have no new entries, six re-entries, no climbers, two non-movers, and two fallers.

Dark Company

Congratulations to Dark Company for topping our charts again! The only month they didn’t manage to do so was August 2026, when the Band of Georges finally achieved top spot.

Holding steady for a second month at number one is the band’s newest release. It is track two from the first CD of their forthcoming triple album, A for Acronym. The song is called Beneath the Skin, and it is an awesome stomping earworm of a classic rock number. It may become the first single release from the album, sometime in the future.

When Beneath the Skin was recorded, the ideas came so thick and fast that the instruments were not tuned as well as they could have been. It seemed more important to get a snapshot of the ideas as they were arriving, rather than check for perfect tuning, which was very unusual for Dark Company. Nearly every part is the first take.

All of the guitar was played on Nicodemus. There are two rhythm guitar parts, the one panned to the right played with fingers, and the one to the left with a pick. They play opposite rhythms to each other in the chorus, which creates a massive sound against Maxx’s thuddy minimalist bass.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis

It’s been a splendid month for The Bastard Sons of Dennis, who have dominance (and perhaps submission as well) over our new chart with six outstanding entries. This is largely due to the increased number of streams on YouTube Music and Apple Music, among other places. But not snotify!

Four of the songs by The Bastard Sons of Dennis are from their Cosy Lube Turtle album. This is a collection of covers of deep cuts by Blue Öyster Cult, lovingly recreated by Derek Broom and Chuck Palmer. One is a BSoD + D² song, also a cover of deep cut by Blue Öyster Cult from the Cruelty to Blues album. There is also a BSoD original.

A progtastic full-band mini-album by the dynamic duo is also in the early stages of finalisation. Sadly we tend to feel that further recordings of their many remaining Blue Oyster Cult covers seems an unlikely prospect. This is mostly due to “discommunication, disorganisation and general untogetherness”, as the legend who is Paul Bateman once said of them when they were in Rough Terrain.

The acoustic progressive rock epic Sometimes from the Cherry Smoke Empire album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis makes a re-entry at number two. This wonderful song makes its first re-entry since February 2024. It was our number one back in January 2020, but then did not chart since March of that year.

Sometimes appears on the album Need For Not by Levitation where it is called Resist.

Mr Lijkkes and Mr Bickers were at Cardiff University together in the early 1990s and had a band called Plastic Snatch. “Look after your plastic!” as the public information film of the time reminded us. The lyrics for Sometimes were apparently inspired by JRR Tolkien’s literary masterpiece The Lord Of The Rings.

Sometimes is a remarkably beautiful and memorable song which our duo first performed live in 1994. Mr Nation never heard the Levitation version until after The Bastard Sons of Dennis had recorded and released this wonderful song.

The grisly tale of spiderlings was improvised and different every time. Fortunately, the version we recorded in the studio happened to be an absolute classic version of his tale.

The next song from The Bastard Sons of Dennis is a re-entry at number three and makes its first appearance since September 2024. This is the penultimate song from the Cosy Lube Turtle album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. She’s as Beautiful as a Foot is another Blue Öyster Cult cover, which originates from the Long Island quintet’s 1972 eponymous album, Blue Öyster Cult. The original version is highly psychedelic.

When covered by The Bastard Sons of Dennis, Chuck tunes his guitar to DADGAD. The twinkly noises at the beginning are created using an old computer fan and its assorted janglesome danglesome appendages. She’s as Beautiful as a Foot was often performed first in a set of Bastard Sons of Dennis songs, due largely to the tuning.

Falling two places from number two to number four is the Cosy Lube Turtle version of Then Came the Last Days of May. Then Came the Last Days of May is a truly beautiful and rather tragic song. The version by our dynamic duo adds a twist to the versions heard on Blue Öyster Cult’s eponymous studio album and the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees album from 1975.

Derek would sing “Now and then a duck” instead of “truck”, which caused fans of the duo to bring toy ducks with them along to live performances. Chuck’s solo is largely based on the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees version, and his little whistle at the end (which didn’t always come out quite right in a live show) came from the character Tom Good in the uk tv sitcom The Good Life.

Another re-entry on this month’s chart is from BSoD + D². This is at number five, and the only song from the Cruelty to Blues album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis with Dave Danielli to feature this month.

She’s as Beautiful as a Foot is another Blue Öyster Cult cover, which originates from the Long Island quintet’s 1972 eponymous album, Blue Öyster Cult. The original version is highly psychedelic. This is an alternative version to the song which also charted at number three.

When covered by The Bastard Sons of Dennis, Chuck tunes his guitar to DADGAD. The twinkly noises at the beginning are created using an old computer fan and its assorted janglesome danglesome appendages. She’s as Beautiful as a Foot was often performed first in a set of Bastard Sons of Dennis songs, due largely to the tuning.

Having just missed out on a top ten place last month, number seven sees a re-entry for Astronomy, a profoundly beautiful and haunting creation. It was composed by the Bouchard brothers, Joe and Albert, and Sandy Pearlman. It is the final track of Blue Öyster Cult’s 1974 Secret Treaties album, and an absolute masterpiece of progressive rock composition.

The version of Astronomy by The Bastard Sons of Dennis is more produced than their live performances. They would often end a show with Astronomy, introducing it as a song that was famously covered by Metallica. “We wrote it, of course; ahem, cough…” Chuck would quip.

Down three from number five to number eight is Seven Screaming Diz-Busters. This a highly esoteric and extraordinary piece of progressive rock composition, beautifully interpreted by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. It is a song for which they were well known.

Originally this song was released by Blue Öyster Cult on their 1973 Tyranny and Mutation album. It was big crowd favourite at a live performances by The Bastard Sons of Dennis and you can enjoy watching a video of them playing it live by clicking here.

Band of Georges

The Band of Georges had three songs that hit the chart in October 2026. One song comes from each of Volume V, Volume II and Volume I.

For the first quarter of last year, we absolutely could not have anticipated the level of dominance over the charts the Band of Georges had during 2025. Why? We were not even expecting to release any of these songs at the start of last year.

The Wud Records website was launched in 2008, replacing the old Wud site which simply disappeared soon afterwards. Ever since before the Wud Records website went live, various people tried to persuade George to allow his old Tascam 244 portastudio demos to be released. He always refused, point blank. There was no arguing with him. It was just: “No.” And that was that.

And then, suddenly, he seems to have had a change of heart. He allowed a few of us to listen to his demos, which we thought were surprisingly good. Certainly a lot better than we had anticipated, given everything he had said about awful they were. Whatever it was that happened, we are delighted that it did. Because now, we have been allowed to release all of the volumes of his early songs in their demo form.

We have done very little work to these recordings. They were just lifted from their master cassettes and digitised in our studios, and normalised to 0dB. That was it. Everything sounds just as it was. The cassettes, nearly 40 years old, have stood the test of time very well.

There are no pages for the Band of Georges at Explicit Music at this time, although some may appear following further negotiations. Each released song from the Band of Georges has a comment or a memory from George on its album’s page here at the Wud Records website. Some of that information, along with other facts regarding each song, appears at its page on SoundCloud. There is likely to be different extra information given on the two separate pages, as the words come from the keyboards of two separate writers. We recommend you check out both.

Losing Your Grip is still at number six. Two months ago was the first time it achieved the top spot, despite being near the top for the previous few months. This song has also been both the number two song, and the number three song, twice each recently. It has been discovered by other SoundCloud members and added to some playlists at SoundCloud, which has certainly helped its popularity.

Losing Your Grip is an odd and perhaps under-rated song, especially so when it was contemporary. There is a glorious chorus and three verses, each being about a different person, and their gradual descents via entropy into insanity. The sections between the verses are either in 6/8, or are atemporal dissolutions into strangeness and noise, with all the knobs on the Electric Mistress turned up to full.

Losing Your Grip was also performed by Wud. Ken did a fine job of singing the vocal parts. You can enjoy the Wud version of Losing Your Grip at the HearThis website by clicking here.

Making its first chart reappearance since May 2025 is I Don’t Care Now by the Band of Georges. This song surprised us all by becoming our most streamed song on SoundCloud in 2025. It maintained its impressive stream count (for a small indie label such as ourselves) for a long time after its initial release, despite never hitting the number one spot and only featuring on the charts twice before.

I Don’t Care Now is a song of hope and recovery, and of starting to feel a bit better following a prolonged period of misery and loneliness. When George was recording this, he was surprised at the direction in which the music took him. He ended up liking it more than he had expected to, and it would seem our followers on SoundCloud did as well. It features the first recorded Van Halen style widdlings that George attempted to lay down, and is in the key of E major.

Making its second appearance on our charts, and first since April 2025, is another re-entry for the Band of Georges. Take Her Away is a song George composed in the late autumn or early winter of 1982, which turned out to be surprisingly poppy. It has a 12-string used judiciously, and the song is in the key of E minor, sometimes G major, and features a few rather esoteric chords, which the Georgemeister has always been rather fond of.

Take Her Away is about a girl in one of George’s ‘A’ Level classes, who he fantasized about taking to Ottery to a Now rehearsal, and hopefully impressing her with his guitaring skills enough for a snuggle. The first part of this plan actually came together, but the snuggling part never did, so he set his sights elsewhere.

* None of our other acts made it onto the October 2026 chart. *

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in October 2026, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen right here at the Wud Records website, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, including our Links collection and homepage.

The October 2026 chart has its very own dedicated page among the charts pages of this website. You can listen to the new compilation on its page by clicking here.

Each of the previous charts also has its own page in the charts section of this website. If you would like to see all our old charts, or for any previous month you are especially interested in, all of them can be accessed easily by clicking here.