Recently for 12 straight weeks, country star Morgan Wallen dominated the Billboard album charts, but now others are breaking through. Last week, Taylor Swift returned to the top with deluxe editions of her latest album, “Midnights,” and this week K-pop group Stray Kids scored their third No. 1 album in 15 months with “Five-Star.”
A barrage of collectable CD releases – 18 in total – sent the eight-member Stray Kids to No. 1. “Five-Star”, featuring 12 tracks mostly sung in Korean, debuted with 231,000, equivalent to 249,500 sales in the United States. Of those on the CD, according to tracking service Luminate.
The album was also credited with nearly 20 million streams. To put that number in perspective, on last week’s singles chart Wallen had 33 million clicks For his No. 1 song “Last Night” — one of 36 tracks from his album “One Thing at a Time,” which debuts at No. 2 this week. (Swift’s “Midnights” dropped four spots to No. 5.)
The success of Wallen, Swift, and Stray Kids is also notable in that all three share the same record label: Republic Records, a division of the giant Universal Music Group. Counting the release of those artists and another by K-pop group TomorrowXTogether in February, Republic has held the No. 1 spot for 15 of the year’s 23 weeks so far.
A bunch of new releases are in the top 10. In third place is “Whitesit Chappelle” by Jelly Roll, the face-tattooed rapper-turned-country singer who has become the toast of Nashville. Enhippen, another K-pop act, follows at No. 4 with “Dark Blood”.
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” soundtrack by star hip-hop producer Metro Boomin – opens with guest appearances by Offset, ASAP Rocky, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Wayne, 21 Savage and many others At number 7. and the Foo Fighters’ “But Here We Are,” the band’s first debut at No. 8 since the death of their drummer Taylor Hawkins the previous year.
