Ranked: The Folk Pop Release Worth Your Week Is Zombie Romance by BlackSheepLad, a Love Song for the Undead
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Ranked: The Folk Pop Release Worth Your Week Is Zombie Romance by BlackSheepLad, a Love Song for the Undead
A Song About Loving the Undead Holds Seventh Place Among BlackSheepLad’s Top Tracks
Seventh. That is where Zombie Romance by BlackSheepLad sits in the artist’s top tracks on Spotify. The folk pop single first came out in the lockdown winter of 2020 and 2021, more than five years ago. What keeps it there is an audience that arrived in stages. BBC local radio found it in 2021 and Fresh on the Net picked it in 2022. A folk show on Argyll FM was still playing it in April 2026.
BlackSheepLad’s songs are in the playlist below, and the full run of coverage sits on the BlackSheepLad profile. Zombie Romance reached BestMusic.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Press play, then stay with the rest of the piece.
BBC Local Radio and a Fresh on the Net Pick Gave BlackSheepLad’s Zombie Romance Its First Listeners
BlackSheepLad is the recording name of singer-songwriter Phil Mellen. Zombie Romance is the song that carried the project past its first circle of listeners. Its biggest early entry came in 2021. Every BBC local radio station played it as part of the BBC’s Upload Festival, according to a 2022 tour listing for the project. For a self-made folk pop single, that is a wide first audience. Dozens of regional stations took it, each with its own loyal daytime following.
The written response followed the same pattern of steady, small-scale support. Indie Dock Music Blog, Mesmerized Mag, The Other Side Reviews and the Portuguese-language site Roadie Music all covered the single. None of them is a national title. Together, though, they gave the song an early paper trail in two languages.
Then, on 8 March 2022, Fresh on the Net placed Zombie Romance at number 12 of 21. The list was its weekly Eclectic Picks. The site sifts around 200 submissions a week, so a place there is a filtered result. Guest curator Mirage took the premise at face value. The note pictured friends and family turning into zombies, then signed up to the songwriter’s plan for dealing with it.
Reading the Spotify Position
Spotify orders an artist’s top tracks by how much they are played now, not by when they came out. That makes the seventh place a current measure rather than a souvenir. Zombie Romance sits behind Better This Christmas, Glue, Making Up For Lost Time, Always the Grey, Black Shuck and Pantomime. Several of those are later releases, including Pantomime and Better This Christmas, both singles from late 2021. It still sits ahead of Timepiece and Grow Old With Me.
A novelty song from the pandemic would usually have fallen out of that list by now. This one has held its ground, and the tally suggests listeners return to it on purpose.
Folk Radio, Poetry Bills and a Narrowboat Session Keep BlackSheepLad’s Zombie Romance in Circulation
The community around the song is the reason it has outlasted the lockdown that inspired it. On 3 April 2026, Trevor Oxborrow played Zombie Romance on Folk At Five, his show on Argyll FM. It came third in the running order, between James J Turner and Steven MacIomhair. That is community radio on the west coast of Scotland, a long way from where the song was written.
The live side has followed a similar route. A 2022 performance for the Narrowboat Sessions gave the song a second life on video. In the same year, BlackSheepLad was billed alongside the Manchester poet Mike Garry for a poetry and music tour. That pairing says a lot about where this audience sits. It lives close to the spoken word, the folk club and the small room.
That pattern matters for a catalogue track. Folk audiences tend to pass songs along by hand, from presenter to presenter and stage to stage. Zombie Romance has the kind of hook that survives that relay. It is a single clear joke about loving someone who has turned into a zombie, sung completely straight.
Who Zombie Romance Is For
The natural listeners are fans of acoustic folk and folk pop who like a dry sense of humour. Anyone who grew up on Jake Thackray will recognise the method: a comic idea delivered with a straight face. Thackray’s Lah-Di-Dah turned marrying into a family into a comic complaint in 1967. Kirsty MacColl did something similar on There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis in 1981. That song wraps a sharp joke in a warm, singable tune. The Beautiful South built a career on sweet melodies carrying sour sentiments, as Don’t Marry Her showed in 1996.
It also suits UK listeners who lived through the 2020 lockdowns. They may want a song that remembers that time with a smile rather than a sigh. And for anyone who found BlackSheepLad through Better This Christmas, it is the obvious next step back into the catalogue.
From the BestMusic.News Curator Team: “A comic song usually burns out after a handful of plays. Zombie Romance is still being chosen by folk presenters five years after release. Its Spotify position says listeners keep coming back, so the warmth under the joke is doing the work.”
Stream Zombie Romance on Spotify, then follow BlackSheepLad on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, or visit the official website.
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