After months of doldrums, we finally get a truly wild week on the Billboard charts, as five albums debut in the top 10. Travis Scott and Justin Bieber headline the cast of newcomers, debuting on the Billboard 200 albums chart at Nos. 1 and 2, respectively. It's also a big week for the veteran hip-hop heavyweight duo Clipse, while rising R&B star Ravyn Lenae posts a major milestone, cracking the top 10 for the first time in her career with "Love Me Not."
TOP ALBUMS
For eight weeks, the Billboard 200 has told a similar story: Morgan Wallen's I'm the Problem has run away with the top spot every week since its release, while everyone else has huffed his exhaust. This time around, though, two albums leapfrog Wallen in their first weeks of release.
At No. 1, Travis Scott's second album-length collaboration with his hip-hop collective JACKBOYS — titled, appropriately enough, JACKBOYS 2 — posts a commanding lead over all competitors, thanks to robust sales (160,000 copies) and solid streaming numbers (it's No. 4 on the streaming chart). Scott knows how to work every angle in the pursuit of No. 1, and JACKBOYS 2 is no different; it's available in many different digital and physical editions, with multiple configurations and bonus tracks to juice its stats. But Scott is hardly alone in those efforts, and JACKBOYS 2's numbers are legitimately huge. A chart-topper is a chart-topper. Heck, Scott deserves a few bonus points for degree of difficulty: The new record didn't drop until Sunday, July 13 — meaning it accomplished more in five days than the chart's other records did in seven.
That said, JACKBOYS 2 followed an entirely different path to the charts compared to the album at No. 2: Justin Bieber's SWAG. Bieber announced SWAG on a day's notice and dropped it without physical editions — no vinyl, no CDs — so his chart numbers were derived almost entirely from streaming. (Remember, physical sales account for nearly 70% of JACKBOYS 2's numbers, thanks to Scott's business model of selling large quantities of physical media directly to fans.) Thankfully for Bieber, SWAG pulled in the best single-week streaming numbers of the singer's career — more than enough to make it Bieber's 11th top 10 album. Expect another chart boost when physical editions drop later this year.
With Wallen down to No. 3, the rest of the top 10 gets loads of fresh blood. Clipse debuts at No. 4 with its first album in 16 years, Let God Sort Em Out; that matches the duo's career peak, set in 2004 upon the debut of Lord Willin'. (Fans of both albums would do well to check out Clipse's recent Tiny Desk concert, if they haven't already.) Two K-pop acts either enter or re-enter the top 10, as TWICE debuts at No. 6 with THIS IS FOR and ATEEZ re-enters the top 10 — and the Billboard 200 chart, for that matter — thanks to a deluxe reissue of GOLDEN HOUR : Part.3. That album's chart trajectory has been wild; it debuted at No. 2 last month, plunged to No. 106, dropped off the chart completely for two weeks and now re-enters, in deluxe form, at No. 7.
But wait, that's not all! GIVĒON scores his second top 10 hit as BELOVED — seriously, musicians, you don't have to stylize your album titles in all caps — debuts at No. 8. And THIS IS FOR isn't the only album featuring TWICE to land in the top 10: Though the soundtrack to KPop Demon Hunters slides from No. 2 to No. 5, its numbers (derived almost entirely from streaming, with physical editions slated to drop later this year) are actually up considerably in its fourth week on the chart. It's just a big, busy week all around, at long last.
TOP SONGS
First, the boring news: Alex Warren's "Ordinary" further cements its "technically the song of the summer" status, as it holds at No. 1 for a seventh nonconsecutive week. Commercial radio stations are spinning the song at a rate that borders on alarming and, given how slow those stations generally are to update their playlists, they're unlikely to ease their grip on "Ordinary" in the weeks and months to come.
Now, the good news: There's actually a fair bit of movement across this week's Hot 100, as new albums upend the charts — Justin Bieber's SWAG lands 16 of its songs on the Hot 100 by itself, while Clipse and Travis Scott add a bunch more — and Ravyn Lenae leaps into the top 10 for the first time with "Love Me Not."
"Love Me Not" has experienced a remarkably slow build. The song dropped in May 2024 — nearly 15 months ago! — and blew up on TikTok late last year. It's only been on the Hot 100 since April, making it (at least chart-wise) a veritable spring chicken next to the likes of Teddy Swims' "Lose Control" and Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)." But now that it's finally taken off, it's rising fast. The song climbs from No. 12 to No. 7 this week, and it's got just the right timeless, summery R&B vibes to stick around for a while.
Though Drake's "What Did I Miss?" drops from No. 2 to No. 8 in its second week, two other songs enjoy huge surges this time around. The first, Bieber's "Daisies," debuts at No. 2; it's the clear early breakout from SWAG, though it'll likely need more buy-in from radio programmers if it's going to stick around into the fall. Then there's another streaming hit: HUNTR/X's "Golden," from KPop Demon Hunters, which climbs from No. 6 to No. 4. HUNTR/X is a fictional group — albeit one that deploys real-life singers EJAE, Audrey Nuna and REI AMI — but the hits are real.
And, as always, the chart's immovable objects remain, well, immovable. "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" sits at No. 6 more than a full calendar year after the song began its run of 19 record-tying weeks at No. 1. And "Lose Control" currently sits at No. 9 in its record-obliterating 100th week on the Hot 100. Naturally, given that it was the first song ever to post 92 weeks on the Hot 100, it's the first song ever to hit triple digits. People, there are so many other songs. Why are we still doing this?
WORTH NOTING
The pop charts exist, generally speaking, to demonstrate the public's enthusiasm for new music. But, thanks in large part to streaming, any scan of the Billboard 200 albums chart will unearth dozens upon dozens of catalog titles — albums from years or even decades ago that just keep on keepin' on.
Often, those albums' chart positions can feel baked in: Fleetwood Mac's Rumours is always bouncing around the Billboard 200's top quartile (it's currently No. 21), Nirvana's Nevermind rarely fluctuates outside the chart's midsection (currently No. 77) and so on. But old albums still frequently experience boomlets based on outside factors, from deaths (look for a surge in Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath's catalogs in the weeks to come) to holidays (Toby Keith's 35 Biggest Hits surged into the top 10 last week because of July 4 festivities before dropping back to No. 59 seven days later).
Sometimes, reviewing the Billboard 200 will produce a mystery that requires a bit of reverse-engineering: Why that album? Why now?
Consider three albums that aren't chart mainstays, circa 2025, but nevertheless re-enter the Billboard 200 this week: Backstreet Boys' 2000 blockbuster Millennium bursts back onto the chart at No. 29, Juice WRLD's posthumous 2020 album Legends Never Die re-enters at No. 40 and Mac Miller's 2011 mixtape I Love Life, Thank You pops up at No. 79. There's no obvious catalyst for their sudden resurgences, until you look more closely: All three sets received deluxe reissues on July 11.
For Millennium, that meant a 25th-anniversary collection that expanded the album to 25 songs: remasters, live versions, B-sides, demos. Legends Never Die's 5 Year Anniversary Edition was released on "Zoetrope Vinyl" — you get optical illusions when the record spins — with a few new songs. And I Love Life, Thank You received its first-ever vinyl pressing for the benefit of fans and collectors alike.
It's a useful reminder that there's more than one way to crash the Billboard charts. In the long and winding life cycle of a hit album, artists and labels are bound to deploy most, if not all, of them eventually.
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