Welcome to Billboard Pro’s Trending Up newsletter, where we take a closer look at the songs, artists, curiosities and trends that have caught the music industry’s attention. Some have come out of nowhere, others have taken months to catch on, and all of them could become ubiquitous in the blink of a TikTok clip. 

This week: One Steve Lacy ‘Oh, Yeah?’ viral hit may give way to another, while Ashe ushers in no-wedding season and RhyRhy gets in before the summer-bummer buzzer.

Steve Lacy Builds Something Out of ‘Nothing’ With Latest Viral Success

Though the Billboard Hot 100-topping singer-songwriter Steve Lacy‘s new album Oh, Yeah? arrived at just No. 14 on the Billboard 200 in August – with none of its advance tracks having yet reached the Hot 100’s top 75 — a month later, the LP’s commercial profile is still growing.

First, the set-opening title track received a huge boost from being featured over the end credits to the box office record-breaking Spider-Man: Brand New Day, resulting in it bounding onto the Hot 100 and into the top 20 — in the process, helping to return advance single “The Feeling” to the chart, and to a new peak of No. 67. Now, the album seems to have a totally new hit on the way in the form of gentle acoustic ballad “Nothing.”

Though “Nothing” is perhaps the least commercial-sounding of the breakout hits from the album thusfar, the sweet unrequited love song has perhaps struck a similar chord to “Bad Habit” back in 2022, and has come to be featured in a wide variety of TikTok edit videos. (Live clips of the song becoming a fan favorite singalong at his Europe and Asia tour dates have also undoubtedly helped.)

As the rising tide of “Oh, Yeah?” continues to lift all songs on its parent album of the same name, “Nothing” has also seen major movement every week on DSPs — racking up 3.2 million official on-demand U.S. streams on the tracking week ending Sept. 3, according to Luminate, a 101% gain from four weeks earlier. Lacy may not be on track to score another No. 1 hit in the immediate future, but it still is looking more and more like “Bad Habit” was just the beginning for the prodigious singer-songwriter-guitarist as a crossover star. – ANDREW UNTERBERGER

Oklahoma Melodic Rap Artist RhyRhy Rides TikTok Virality to Late-Breaking Hit With ‘Summer Bummer’ 

The TikTok snippet to hit single pipeline has proven to be one of the most effective music marketing strategies of the 2020s, and RhyRhy’s “Summer Bummer” is the latest example. 

Hailing from Tulsa, Oklahoma, RhyRhy started teasing “Summer Bummer” with a June 30 TikTok post that followed a successful campaign for her previous single, “Miami Girl” (with 4edori). That initial TikTok clip earned nearly 300,000 views and over 34,5000 likes, setting the stage for a plethora of follow-up promotional clips from RhyRhy, including two that have reached over one million views each. By Aug. 18, TikTok creator @/playboi.jerry2x, launched a dance challenge that has since been viewed over 440,000 times, kicking off a popular dance trend. By the time “Summer Bummer” arrived on DSPs on Aug. 21 (via Alama Records/Sony Music Entertainment), the song was already a smash hit in the TikTok universe. 

According to Luminate, “Summer Bummer” earned 1.3 million official on-demand U.S. streams in its first full week of release (Aug. 21-27). The following week (Aug. 28-Sept. 4), that figure leapt by 42% to over 1.86 streams. During the Friday-Monday period of Aug. 28-31, “Summer Bummer” logged 1.03 million streams, with that figure jumping nearly 19% to over 1.22 million streams a week later (Sept. 4-7). 

The official “Summer Bummer” sound currently plays in over 4.9 million TikToks and over 9,000 Instagram Reels. Notbaly, RhyRhy’s On the Radar live performance of the song, which premiered Sept. 3, has already collected over 27,000 views. A TikTok breakout of the performance boasts over 858,000 views.

Although fall is quickly approaching, it looks like RhyRhy just may squeeze one final hit out of this summer. — KYLE DENIS 

A ‘Stop’ Start for Ashe

California-via-Nashville artist Ashe has thrived as a pop singer-songwriter operating just below the mainstream for nearly a decade now, with catchy, quirky singles like “Another Man’s Jeans,” Louis the Child collab “World on Fire” and Niall Horan-featuring Hot 100 hit “Moral of the Story” building her a strong following but not quite propelling her to stardom. That may be about to change with the viral embrace of her latest single, the delectably dramatic “Stop the Wedding!”

A song that certainly earns its title’s exclamation mark, “Wedding” features heavy strings supporting Ashe’s warnings to her younger self to jet from her nuptials before they begin. (She got married at age 23, with the marriage dissolving not long thereafter.) The song has unsurprisingly been adopted by TikTok users offering similar cautions to themselves and others about various red flags that should be automatic wedding-stoppers — with a promotional moment of a series of “brides” running through NYC while playing the song also helping grease the viral wheels.

As a result of the song’s online spread, its weekly streams have also begun to swell — from under 1.5 million official on-demand streams the week ending Aug. 13, to nearly 2.9 million streams four weeks later, a 94% gain, according to Luminate. Will autumn be even kinder to Ashe’s anti-wedding message than the summer months? If so, she might be on track to doubling her number of Hot 100 hits by the end of the year. – AU