There’s a funny thing that happens to Thriller every single year. The leaves turn, the Halloween decorations go up and a song from 1982 starts climbing the charts all over again like it never left.
It runs like clockwork. People dig out the costumes, the party playlists fill up and Michael’s spooky masterpiece slides right back into heavy rotation across the radio and the streaming apps. But Halloween 2025 was different. This time the climb actually made history.
In the chart week heading into Halloween, Thriller jumped back onto the Billboard Hot 100. The week after, it leapt all the way to number 10. And that leap did something no artist had ever pulled off in the entire history of the chart.
News report: why Thriller tops the charts every Halloween
With that top 10, Michael became the first artist ever to land a top 10 hit on the Hot 100 across six different decades. The seventies, the eighties, the nineties, the two thousands, the twenty tens and now the twenties. The man who held the old record, Andy Williams, had managed five. Michael just went one further, fifty years after he first cracked the top 10 as a kid.
Sit with what that actually means. A song older than most of the people streaming it, still powerful enough every single autumn to go toe to toe with records set by artists who are alive and dropping brand new music this very week. In that one Halloween stretch it pulled something like fourteen million streams and reached a radio audience in the millions.
And the album it came from is still in a league all its own, widely counted as the best selling album of all time anywhere on the planet. More than forty years on, Thriller simply refuses to stay buried. Which, for this particular song, feels exactly right.
The official Thriller video
So when it climbs the charts again this Halloween, and it will, that isn’t just nostalgia doing the work. The song keeps setting fresh records every single time it comes back around.